Re: E-mail package

[Christopher Howard <christopher@librehacker.com>]

gfp <gfp@posteo.at> writes:

> Hi,
>
> thanks for answering me.
>
> I need a graphical view of folders, because I have created approx. 100
> folders and put every email via filters in those folders.
> So I can quickly find messages related to some specific topic or addresses.
>
> I don't know at the moment how could I achieve that in Emacs.
> Secondly I am learning Emacs and am not yet in a stage to do
> everything via keybindings.
> I also don't know how much time it would need to set up my e-mail
> stuff in Emacs.
> I used already so much time to learn Emacs and to set up something in
> Emacs takes a lot of time, which I don´t have.
> I read that to set up Gnus takes much time.
>

There is a learning curve to Gnus, for sure, but the info manual is very helpful, and also there is a
#gnus irc channel on libera that is helpful.

Gnus has something called "Groups" and a "Group Buffer". These groups can be thought of like folders, and through "splitting", incoming mail can be moved into various groups automatically based on subject, From addresses, and so forth. I use this for splitting mailing lists out into their own groups.

After that, you get more great things you can do with groups, like assigning levels of importance to groups. This way, you can choose to view only certain groups depending on, say, how much spare time you have a give moment. And within a group, you can filter out threads that are not of interest to you.

Further advantages of Gnus is (1) it integrates well with your other Emacs processes and configuration; and (2) you can use it to handle other kinds of messages, through various Gnus backends. E.g., nnatom and nnrss can be used to process Blog and News feeds.

Since you have some involvement in Emacs already, I would encourage giving more consideration to Gnus. It allows you to apply to the power of Emacs text processing and programmability to the whole notion of "processing news", which includes handling incoming e-mail messages, as well as various other sources of information.

-- 
Christopher Howard