Using R-mail in Emacs

Using R-mail in Emacs

[Ryan Lloyd]

Good Day,

I was wondering if someone could help me.

I am tying to get emacs to read and send e-mails to my email account 
(not gmail).

I have scoured the internet and everything I have tied has not worked. 
there seems to be alot of different advice as to what you need to have 
in the .emacs file in order to get rmail to work in emacs, but nothing 
has worked for me.

I have the following:

Secure SSL/TLS Settings (Recommended)
Username: 	ryan.lloyd@tank406.co.za - (which is the same as my email 
address)
Password: 	Use the email account’s password.
Incoming Server: 	cob.serv.co.za

  * IMAP Port: 993

Outgoing Server: 	cob.serv.co.za

  * SMTP Port: 465


can any help me with advice on how to set it up in rmail?

Regards,

Ryan Lloyd

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Bob Newell]

Sending mail should be easy. M-x mail, fill out the fields, write your
mail, then C-c C-s to send. You'll be prompted for your server and
credentials, and then offered the opportunity to save those to
.authinfo (which you should do). No more to it than that, and although
that's just the rudiments, you can send mail.

Reading mail is different. If you're staying with rmail, you'll need
an external program to fetch your mail and put it into your inboxes.
That's out of scope for this message (you can research it) but for
IMAP you can use dovecot or many others. Once your mail is properly
stored on your computer you can then read it easily enough with M-x
rmail. See "Reading Mail with Rmail" in the Emacs manual.

In the end, though, you may find rmail too simple and lacking options.
You may not want to go all the way and use gnus, but there are other
options that give you more than rmail without the learning curve of
gnus (although ultimately gnus is worth the effort, you just have to
stay with it).

Aloha from Hawai`i nei,

Bob Newell
Honolulu

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Ryan Lloyd wrote:

> I was wondering if someone could help me.
>
> I am tying to get emacs to read and send
> e-mails to my email account (not gmail).

Many people, and in particular the Gnus users,
will argue that Emacs Gnus is a better choice
for mails to and from Emacs than Rmail.
Gnus can do many other things as well, which
Rmail cannot, but even for just email, Gnus is
better. One key aspect where Rmail is failing
is it collects all the emails into a single
file. This will soon be unmanageably big.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>
> Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2018 22:10:57 +0200
> 
> One key aspect where Rmail is failing
> is it collects all the emails into a single
> file. This will soon be unmanageably big.

That's not true, because you are supposed to delete mails you no
longer need, or file them to various mail folders.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Joost Kremers]

On Wed, Sep 12 2018, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Ryan Lloyd wrote:
>
>> I was wondering if someone could help me.
>>
>> I am tying to get emacs to read and send
>> e-mails to my email account (not gmail).
>
> Many people, and in particular the Gnus users,
> will argue that Emacs Gnus is a better choice
> for mails to and from Emacs than Rmail.

Note that Gnus isn't the only option when it comes to email in 
Emacs. Included with Emacs is also MH-E, and there are several 
external packages, such as  notmuch-emacs, Wanderlust, Mew and 
mu4e.

See also <https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryMail>.

Of the ones listed here, I only tried Gnus, which I couldn't get 
used to, and mu4e, which I love and use. (I also used mutt for a 
long time, with Emacs as editor, and I still do, occasionally; 
IMHO it's also a good option, but in the end I prefer having 
everything email-related in Emacs, not just the writing of 
messages.)


-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[YUE Daian]

On 2018-09-12 22:10, Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com> wrote:
> Ryan Lloyd wrote:
>
>> I was wondering if someone could help me.
>>
>> I am tying to get emacs to read and send
>> e-mails to my email account (not gmail).
>
> Many people, and in particular the Gnus users,
> will argue that Emacs Gnus is a better choice
> for mails to and from Emacs than Rmail.
> Gnus can do many other things as well, which
> Rmail cannot, but even for just email, Gnus is
> better. One key aspect where Rmail is failing
> is it collects all the emails into a single
> file. This will soon be unmanageably big.
>
> -- 
> underground experts united
> http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

I agree that the way Rmail handles your mail (in one big file) is not
good enough for modern usage.

I have used several mail clients for Emacs:
Gnus -> Mew -> Mu4e -> Notmuch.
(All on one old i5 Thinkpad.)

Notmuch is what I finally settled in.
It provides Google like search facility together with tag-based email
management.

For example query "tag:attachment from:john" returns emails sent from
John that have attachments.

Also a shining point is that it does not touch original
files in your maildir. And it is super fast and easy to setup.

Gnus is very powerful especially for reading feeds because it was
designed initially for reading news groups.
It has some unique features like mail auto-expiration etc.

However the disadvantage is that it is really slow. 2000+ emails in one
group will stuck it for a long time every time I open the mail box. Also
it is really complicated to setup and hack.

Mew is not that famous. It was faster than Gnus but it moves your mails
to its own directory with integer names, which I do not really like.

Mu4e is interesting. If I recall correctly, it used to be based on
Notmuch but later got changed. It is similar to Notmuch, but I dislike
the difficulty to configure its home screen. And it was slower than
Notmuch on my machine.


This is just my personal idea based on my experiences. Hope that helps.

Danny

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eric S Fraga]

On Thursday, 13 Sep 2018 at 05:39, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>
>> Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2018 22:10:57 +0200
>
>> 
>> One key aspect where Rmail is failing
>> is it collects all the emails into a single
>> file. This will soon be unmanageably big.
>
> That's not true, because you are supposed to delete mails you no
> longer need, or file them to various mail folders.

Maybe but I'd rather have the system work for me instead of me having to
work at it.  gnus will smartly auto-delete emails for me and will split
(if desired) as well.  In any case, with good searching capabilities, I
find I no longer split much of my email but keep it in a single "group"
(aka folder).  

(I'm not pushing gnus as there are plenty of other alternatives some
people prefer.)

-- 
Eric S Fraga via Emacs 27.0.50 & org 9.1.13 on Debian buster/sid

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Jude DaShiell]

why I don't like mbox file format.  I had an occassion to do a malware
check on a machine and the mail spool had a message in it with malware.  I
ended up having to delete that entire mail spool file before all messages
were read.  An alternative is nmail but I don't know if rmail can work
with nmail.



--

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

YUE Daian wrote:

> However the disadvantage is that it is really
> slow. 2000+ emails in one group will stuck it
> for a long time every time I open the mail
> box.

Gnus is slow, but not that slow. I have, on my
R-Pi, 8466 mails in mail.misc, and 6648 in
mail.sent, and both open up all but instantly
for the most recent 100 or so for any of these.

I didn't try to display all of them at once
tho, but I can imagine that would take a while.

But for that to happen for you every time may
be a backend issue; I use nnml, and don't have
any experience with any others for mail.

> Also it is really complicated to setup
> and hack.

Nah, it can be somewhat complicated to setup
for normal use if you are not used to have
stuff all configuration based (i.e. all data
and settings in files).

To hack it will be as complicated as you
like it.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Jude DaShiell wrote:

> why I don't like mbox file format. I had an
> occassion to do a malware check on a machine
> and the mail spool had a message in it with
> malware. I ended up having to delete that
> entire mail spool file before all messages
> were read.

+1

Just one example of how you can't use your
everyday GNU/Unix tools on your mail files the
way you are used to, if everything is in
a single file.

> An alternative is nmail but I don't know if
> rmail can work with nmail.

I don't think you can use different backends
with Rmail.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: YUE Daian <sheepduke@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 14:33:47 +0800
> 
> I agree that the way Rmail handles your mail (in one big file) is not
> good enough for modern usage.

It serves me very well for many years, FWIW.  Maybe you last looked at
it too long ago, and it's time to take a second look.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Martin Šlouf]

> Notmuch is what I finally settled in.
> It provides Google like search facility together with tag-based email
> management.

+1 for notmuch

- easy to setup
- super easy search
- fast (once you set your filters correctly -- ie. limit your initial
filters by date)
- don't mess up with your Maildir folder, so you can access your
messages with different tools if need be (mutt)
- notmuch for my mail is like magit for my development

but to be honest, one has to:

1. download mail and store it (prefferably Maildir format?)
=> use fetchmail for that
2. tag all incoming mail as needed
=> use custom shell script for that
3. configure emacs
=> if you have plenty of mail, setting date limit is crucial, otherwise
font-lock mode (I want it) kills the mail browsing experience

m.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>
> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 10:13:51 +0200
> 
> > That's not true, because you are supposed to delete mails you no
> > longer need, or file them to various mail folders.
> 
> Maybe but I'd rather have the system work for me instead of me having to
> work at it.  gnus will smartly auto-delete emails for me and will split
> (if desired) as well.

You mean, Gnus can know when you have no more use of some email
message and it can be discarded?  How does it do that?

> In any case, with good searching capabilities, I find I no longer
> split much of my email but keep it in a single "group" (aka folder).

When you have no good idea what to search for, having related email
messages together in the same folder will help finding what you are
looking for faster.  So I find that some classification is still
useful, although I have search capabilities set up that can find any
email in split-seconds.

> (I'm not pushing gnus as there are plenty of other alternatives some
> people prefer.)

I'm not pushing Rmail, either.  But there's no need to denigrate a
solution if you find another solution better suited to your needs.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 07:51:47 -0400
> From: Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com>
> 
> why I don't like mbox file format.  I had an occassion to do a malware
> check on a machine and the mail spool had a message in it with malware.  I
> ended up having to delete that entire mail spool file before all messages
> were read.

When (very rarely) I get a malformed email that stops Rmail in its
tracks, I edit the mbox file by visiting it literally, and remove the
offending message.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Robert Pluim]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>
>> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 10:13:51 +0200
>> 
>> > That's not true, because you are supposed to delete mails you no
>> > longer need, or file them to various mail folders.
>> 
>> Maybe but I'd rather have the system work for me instead of me having to
>> work at it.  gnus will smartly auto-delete emails for me and will split
>> (if desired) as well.
>
> You mean, Gnus can know when you have no more use of some email
> message and it can be discarded?  How does it do that?

It does (at least) time based auto-expiration. Probably score based as
well [1], plus you can mark messages as expirable/unexpirable.

> When you have no good idea what to search for, having related email
> messages together in the same folder will help finding what you are
> looking for faster.  So I find that some classification is still
> useful, although I have search capabilities set up that can find any
> email in split-seconds.

Iʼm also a fan of the 'big ball of email' model. Filing stuff into
sub-folders just makes me forget where I put it.

Footnotes:
[1]  Lack of features is not a problem Gnus has

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com>
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 16:34:14 +0200
> 
> > You mean, Gnus can know when you have no more use of some email
> > message and it can be discarded?  How does it do that?
> 
> It does (at least) time based auto-expiration. Probably score based as
> well [1], plus you can mark messages as expirable/unexpirable.

The oldest email in my INBOX is from 18 years ago, and I still need it
from time to time.  I guess time-based expiration is not for me.

> > When you have no good idea what to search for, having related email
> > messages together in the same folder will help finding what you are
> > looking for faster.  So I find that some classification is still
> > useful, although I have search capabilities set up that can find any
> > email in split-seconds.
> 
> Iʼm also a fan of the 'big ball of email' model. Filing stuff into
> sub-folders just makes me forget where I put it.

I don't have a lot of folders: less than 2 dozen.  Rmail is customized
to automatically guess the right folder given certain keywords in a
message, and it guesses right with high probability.  My experience is
that the classification into a small number of folders helps a lot to
find material, so I guess to each one their own.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> (I'm not pushing gnus as there are plenty of
>> other alternatives some people prefer.)
>
> I'm not pushing Rmail, either.

I'm pushing Gnus. The reason is, it is much
better than Rmail.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Robert Pluim wrote:

> I'm also a fan of the 'big ball of email'
> model. Filing stuff into sub-folders just
> makes me forget where I put it.

But hey, why stop at emails? How about having
all source code, all other writing, and all
multimedia files in single files, as well?
Heck, why not compress the whole filesystem
into a single file, and then have a monolithic,
one-executable OS operate on that? Then, one
would be quite certain where everything is.
I mean, how could anything ever get lost in
such a wonderful architecture?

> Lack of features is not a problem Gnus has

Someone said Gnus is the longest program
ever written. That's true at least if you
consider the individual defuns in the source :)

PS. Nah, someone said earlier that Gnus is
    slow. Emacs Lisp is perhaps slow as well.
    This is the reason for the long defuns,
    modulizing 'em up would make it even
    slower.

    The reason for the plethora of features
    OTOH is the same as for Emacs, people just
    continued adding features, and they never
    stopped, and they never stopped, and they
    never stopped adding features. DS.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eric S Fraga]

On Thursday, 13 Sep 2018 at 17:10, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I'm not pushing Rmail, either.  But there's no need to denigrate a
> solution if you find another solution better suited to your needs.

I didn't denigrate anything, as far as I can tell.  I simply responded
to your comment about deleting emails etc. to avoid having your inbox
mail folder get too large.  I would rather have the system do mundane
things for me; YMMV, of course.

-- 
Eric S Fraga via Emacs 27.0.50 & org 9.1.13 on Debian buster/sid

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Bob Newell]

1) Emacs mail clients

Long ago, I used rmail and it was okay for my purposes. That
was long before the days of Gmail, and when POP3 was
considered pretty advanced stuff. Rmail was rudimentary but
still allowed me to do stuff while remaining in Emacs.

Eventually I moved to VM ("view mail"). That was pretty good;
it did more things than rmail but it wasn't overly complex to
configure. But IMAP was now fast becoming the 'thing'
especially where I worked. Gmail was now big, too.

It wasn't that everything wouldn't have worked with VM, or for
that matter, even Rmail. But there would have been a bunch of
external stuff to set up and run.

So I went to Gnus. There is nothing you can't do with Gnus if
you have the patience. Admittedly it took days rather than
hours to get everything working, and of course I've been
modifying and tweaking for years, to the point at which it's
now indispensible even if it's somewhat (but not
objectionably) slower than a native web interface such as
Gmail.

I've not tried mu4e, wanderlust, etc. and I don't say that
gnus is for everyone. You have to like to tinker and you need
patience and persistence in the early days (maybe weeks). But
the point is that there are a variety of Emacs mail clients to meet
a variety of needs.

2) Everything in one file

"Everything in one file" is (for me at least) a good approach
for certain things. I write novels and publish books with
Emacs (nearly a dozen so far) and doing that with org-mode and
having everything in one file is a huge advantage, even if the
file grows to a half dozen megabytes (with research materials
incorporated). It's relatively portable, diffable, and a
simple version control system is more than adequate.

But for email? Would I want my 5+ gigabytes of historical
email in one file? Of course that's a bit ridiculous, but the
point stands. And yes, rmail can sort your stuff into various
mail files, some of which will themselves become very large
unless you further sort them down. So I just don't see rmail as a
vehicle for long-term high-volume email needs. With Gnus, I
just leave mail on the IMAP server(s) and avoid all the
problems, including having email synced among the seven
devices that I use.

And yes, that means I can't read email while on an airplane,
which I actually consider an advantage in some ways.

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i
* Via Gnus/BBDB/Org/Emacs/Linux *

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Loris Bennett]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com>
>> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 16:34:14 +0200
>>
>> > You mean, Gnus can know when you have no more use of some email
>> > message and it can be discarded?  How does it do that?
>>
>> It does (at least) time based auto-expiration. Probably score based as
>> well [1], plus you can mark messages as expirable/unexpirable.
>
> The oldest email in my INBOX is from 18 years ago, and I still need it
> from time to time.  I guess time-based expiration is not for me.

The default is for articles not to expire - you have to mark an email
explicitly as expirable for it to get deleted at some point.

>> > When you have no good idea what to search for, having related email
>> > messages together in the same folder will help finding what you are
>> > looking for faster.  So I find that some classification is still
>> > useful, although I have search capabilities set up that can find any
>> > email in split-seconds.
>>
>> Iʼm also a fan of the 'big ball of email' model. Filing stuff into
>> sub-folders just makes me forget where I put it.
>
> I don't have a lot of folders: less than 2 dozen.  Rmail is customized
> to automatically guess the right folder given certain keywords in a
> message, and it guesses right with high probability.  My experience is
> that the classification into a small number of folders helps a lot to
> find material, so I guess to each one their own.

For many years I have used a less than a dozen folders with Gnus
splitting mechanism for sorting incoming mail, although lately I have
moved to server-side rules to allow me to read mail more selectively on
devices without Gnus.  However, I feel the many-folder approach does
have some drawbacks.  Does an email from my wife about school need to be
filed in "family" or "school"?  Similar but more subtle situations occur
with my work mail.  For this reason I find myself thinking that just one
or two folders with a good search mechanism would be a more flexible
solution.  I've had a look at mu4e but the whole offline IMAP
construction puts me off a bit.  I always thought it was necessary
because IMAP is fundamentally just slow, but searching through my mail
using an Outlook web client is, to my chagrin as a bit of a FOSS
die-hard, extremely fast.  Does anyone know why that should be?

Cheers,

Loris

PS: Eli, shouldn't that 18-year-old mail in your INBOX have been filed
away into one of your two dozen folders by now 😉? Or is it maybe one of
those tricky corner-cases 😅?

-- 
This signature is currently under construction.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Robert Pluim]

Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net> writes:

> And yes, that means I can't read email while on an airplane,
> which I actually consider an advantage in some ways.

Remember what I said about gnus not lacking features: you can download
your email using the Gnus agent, and then reply to your heart's
content whilst in the air. [1]

But you probably knew that already.

Robert

Footnotes:
[1]  If youʼre really lucky, the plane might have wifi and working
     internet access at a reasonable price

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Robert Pluim]

"Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> From: Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com>
>>> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>>> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 16:34:14 +0200
>>>
>>> > You mean, Gnus can know when you have no more use of some email
>>> > message and it can be discarded?  How does it do that?
>>>
>>> It does (at least) time based auto-expiration. Probably score based as
>>> well [1], plus you can mark messages as expirable/unexpirable.
>>
>> The oldest email in my INBOX is from 18 years ago, and I still need it
>> from time to time.  I guess time-based expiration is not for me.
>
> The default is for articles not to expire - you have to mark an email
> explicitly as expirable for it to get deleted at some point.
>

Yes, although (if memory serves), marking the email as read marks it
as expirable by default. As you can guess, I donʼt use it.

> For many years I have used a less than a dozen folders with Gnus
> splitting mechanism for sorting incoming mail, although lately I have
> moved to server-side rules to allow me to read mail more selectively on
> devices without Gnus.  However, I feel the many-folder approach does
> have some drawbacks.  Does an email from my wife about school need to be
> filed in "family" or "school"?  Similar but more subtle situations occur
> with my work mail.  For this reason I find myself thinking that just one
> or two folders with a good search mechanism would be a more flexible
> solution.  I've had a look at mu4e but the whole offline IMAP
> construction puts me off a bit.  I always thought it was necessary
> because IMAP is fundamentally just slow, but searching through my mail
> using an Outlook web client is, to my chagrin as a bit of a FOSS
> die-hard, extremely fast.  Does anyone know why that should be?

You could use the gnus agent to keep a local copy of your email and
search that (or offlineimap, and probably others)

> Cheers,
>
> Loris
>
> PS: Eli, shouldn't that 18-year-old mail in your INBOX have been filed
> away into one of your two dozen folders by now 😉? Or is it maybe one of
> those tricky corner-cases 😅?

Emacs development is a slow but inevitable process :-)

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de>
> Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 09:34:10 +0200
> 
> > The oldest email in my INBOX is from 18 years ago, and I still need it
> > from time to time.  I guess time-based expiration is not for me.
> 
> The default is for articles not to expire - you have to mark an email
> explicitly as expirable for it to get deleted at some point.

If that is true (Robert seems to say it isn't by default), then Gnus
is not different from Rmail, where I explicitly delete messages I
don't want to keep (and filing them to an archive folder by default
marks it as deleted), and then expunge my INBOX once a week to
physically remove those marked for deletion.

> Does an email from my wife about school need to be filed in "family"
> or "school"?

At worst, you will have to search both folders, which is still better
than searching all of them.  And when that happens, it's an
opportunity to rethink the way you organized your folders.

> For this reason I find myself thinking that just one or two folders
> with a good search mechanism would be a more flexible solution.

When you have a good idea what is you are searching form,
i.e. remember some unique phrase or some other attribute, then folders
are entirely irrelevant, because you can search all of your archives
in milliseconds.  Folders are only of help when you don't have a good
idea what to search for, and only a very vague recollection of the
issue you want to find.

> PS: Eli, shouldn't that 18-year-old mail in your INBOX have been filed
> away into one of your two dozen folders by now 😉? Or is it maybe one of
> those tricky corner-cases 😅?

Filing mail away means it's out of sight.  There are things I don't
want to be out of my sight, ever.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Robert Pluim]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: "Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de>
>> Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 09:34:10 +0200
>> 
>> > The oldest email in my INBOX is from 18 years ago, and I still need it
>> > from time to time.  I guess time-based expiration is not for me.
>> 
>> The default is for articles not to expire - you have to mark an email
>> explicitly as expirable for it to get deleted at some point.
>
> If that is true (Robert seems to say it isn't by default), then Gnus

I may have misremembered that section of the manual. Caveat gnusor

..time passes...

In (info "(Gnus)Expiring Mail")

       You do not have to mark articles as expirable by hand.  Gnus provides
    two features, called “auto-expire” and “total-expire”, that can help you
    with this.  In a nutshell, “auto-expire” means that Gnus hits ‘E’ for
    you when you select an article.  And “total-expire” means that Gnus
    considers all articles as expirable that are read.  So, in addition to
    the articles marked ‘E’, also the articles marked ‘r’, ‘R’, ‘O’, ‘K’,
    ‘Y’ (and so on) are considered expirable.  ‘gnus-auto-expirable-marks’
    has the full list of these marks.

So I was wrong: you have to turn on 'auto-expire' or 'total-expire'
for Gnus to do this.

Robert

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Loris Bennett]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: "Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de>
>> Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 09:34:10 +0200
>> 
>> > The oldest email in my INBOX is from 18 years ago, and I still need it
>> > from time to time.  I guess time-based expiration is not for me.
>> 
>> The default is for articles not to expire - you have to mark an email
>> explicitly as expirable for it to get deleted at some point.
>
> If that is true (Robert seems to say it isn't by default), then Gnus
> is not different from Rmail, where I explicitly delete messages I
> don't want to keep (and filing them to an archive folder by default
> marks it as deleted), and then expunge my INBOX once a week to
> physically remove those marked for deletion.

I think Robert is incorrect here. In the documentation here

  https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Expiring-Mail.html

it says

  "Gnus will not delete your old, read mail. Unless you ask it to, of
  course."

>> Does an email from my wife about school need to be filed in "family"
>> or "school"?
>
> At worst, you will have to search both folders, which is still better
> than searching all of them.  And when that happens, it's an
> opportunity to rethink the way you organized your folders.
>
>> For this reason I find myself thinking that just one or two folders
>> with a good search mechanism would be a more flexible solution.

The above is, indeed, me rethinking.

> When you have a good idea what is you are searching form,
> i.e. remember some unique phrase or some other attribute, then folders
> are entirely irrelevant, because you can search all of your archives
> in milliseconds.  Folders are only of help when you don't have a good
> idea what to search for, and only a very vague recollection of the
> issue you want to find.

My problem is that there doesn't seem to be a pure IMAP solution for
Emacs with which I can search 'in milliseconds'.  A worst case for me is
more like 10 seconds, although ultimately I can also live with that.

>> PS: Eli, shouldn't that 18-year-old mail in your INBOX have been filed
>> away into one of your two dozen folders by now 😉? Or is it maybe one of
>> those tricky corner-cases 😅?
>
> Filing mail away means it's out of sight.  There are things I don't
> want to be out of my sight, ever.

Cheers,

Loris

-- 
This signature is currently under construction.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Bob Newell wrote:

> There is nothing you can't do with Gnus if
> you have the patience. Admittedly it took
> days rather than hours to get everything
> working, and of course I've been modifying
> and tweaking for years [...] You have to like
> to tinker and you need patience and
> persistence in the early days (maybe weeks).

It can be like this with Gnus, and I've had the
exact same experience, but it's because I have
certain ideas and because I was used from the
Emacs world to be able to get everything the
way I wanted, so that's what I expected and did
with Gnus as well.

However, I don't think it has to be that way,
if someone is happy with the way it works and
looks day one, and I don't see why that cannot
be the case, then it is a matter of putting
a bunch of data in .gnus, do M-x gnus RET, and
instigate your very first flame war.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Devin Prater]

I'm still looking for a good way to use Gnus. I have a few email addresses, and putting in all the server info is quite a bit of work compared to other,non-Emacs clients, like Gmail, Apple Mail, and even Outlook. They look at the @domain, like @gmail.com, in the Email Address, and just get the server info from that, and its good.
I know that many probably use their own mail server, or do some mystical Emacs stuff to make it faster, but as a person who has come from the GUI all his life, but also loves the simple genius of a UI and UX that Emacs offers, I'd love to have the option to streamline all this, kind of like the setup for ZSH, which is just awesome., 

Devin Prater
Assistive Technology Instructor certified by World Services for the Blind
JAWS certified 

> On Sep 14, 2018, at 4:31 AM, Loris Bennett <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
>>> From: "Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de>
>>> Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 09:34:10 +0200
>>> 
>>>> The oldest email in my INBOX is from 18 years ago, and I still need it
>>>> from time to time.  I guess time-based expiration is not for me.
>>> 
>>> The default is for articles not to expire - you have to mark an email
>>> explicitly as expirable for it to get deleted at some point.
>> 
>> If that is true (Robert seems to say it isn't by default), then Gnus
>> is not different from Rmail, where I explicitly delete messages I
>> don't want to keep (and filing them to an archive folder by default
>> marks it as deleted), and then expunge my INBOX once a week to
>> physically remove those marked for deletion.
> 
> I think Robert is incorrect here. In the documentation here
> 
>  https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Expiring-Mail.html
> 
> it says
> 
>  "Gnus will not delete your old, read mail. Unless you ask it to, of
>  course."
> 
>>> Does an email from my wife about school need to be filed in "family"
>>> or "school"?
>> 
>> At worst, you will have to search both folders, which is still better
>> than searching all of them.  And when that happens, it's an
>> opportunity to rethink the way you organized your folders.
>> 
>>> For this reason I find myself thinking that just one or two folders
>>> with a good search mechanism would be a more flexible solution.
> 
> The above is, indeed, me rethinking.
> 
>> When you have a good idea what is you are searching form,
>> i.e. remember some unique phrase or some other attribute, then folders
>> are entirely irrelevant, because you can search all of your archives
>> in milliseconds.  Folders are only of help when you don't have a good
>> idea what to search for, and only a very vague recollection of the
>> issue you want to find.
> 
> My problem is that there doesn't seem to be a pure IMAP solution for
> Emacs with which I can search 'in milliseconds'.  A worst case for me is
> more like 10 seconds, although ultimately I can also live with that.
> 
>>> PS: Eli, shouldn't that 18-year-old mail in your INBOX have been filed
>>> away into one of your two dozen folders by now 😉? Or is it maybe one of
>>> those tricky corner-cases 😅?
>> 
>> Filing mail away means it's out of sight.  There are things I don't
>> want to be out of my sight, ever.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Loris
> 
> -- 
> This signature is currently under construction.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Loris Bennett]

Devin Prater <r.d.t.prater@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm still looking for a good way to use Gnus. I have a few email addresses, and
> putting in all the server info is quite a bit of work compared to
> other,non-Emacs clients, like Gmail, Apple Mail, and even Outlook. They look at
> the @domain, like @gmail.com, in the Email Address, and just get the server info
> from that, and its good.
> I know that many probably use their own mail server, or do some mystical Emacs
> stuff to make it faster, but as a person who has come from the GUI all his life,
> but also loves the simple genius of a UI and UX that Emacs offers, I'd love to
> have the option to streamline all this, kind of like the setup for ZSH, which is
> just awesome.,
>
> Devin Prater
> Assistive Technology Instructor certified by World Services for the Blind
> JAWS certified

You can obviously do a lot of fancy stuff with Gnus, but to get going
something like the following should be enough:

  (require 'gnus)
  (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
	(quote
	 ((nnimap "gmx"
		  (nnimap-stream tls)
		  (nnimap-address "imap.gmx.com"))
	  (nnimap "gmail"
		  (nnimap-stream ssl)
		  (nnimap-address "imap.gmail.com"))
	  )))

As you say, you have to find the appropriate values for 'nnimap-stream',
but you only have to do that once.

Having thus smugly claimed that setting up Gnus is easy, I must admit
that, before finally switching a few years ago, I had tried and failed
on a number of occasions, so YMMV.

[snip (65 lines)]

Cheers,

Loris

--
Dr. Loris Bennett (Mr.)
ZEDAT, Freie Universität Berlin         Email loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de
-- 
This signature is currently under construction.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Bob Newell wrote:

> Would I want my 5+ gigabytes of historical
> email in one file?

Exactly. You would need Emacs Windows to even
browse it :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Loris Bennett wrote:

> Does an email from my wife about school need
> to be filed in "family" or "school"?
> Similar but more subtle situations occur with
> my work mail.

The directory approach doesn't have to deal
with such tricky sorting. The more common
approach, I'm sure, is to have mail.misc,
mail.sent, drafts, gmane.emacs.help,
gmane.emacs.gnus.general, rec.bicycles.tech,
and so on, to name but a few example from my
own system.

To split the mails into directories based on
who they are from can be done easily with Gnus,
if one would really want to. But to split them
based on content cannot ever be done to work
flawlessly and I'd disencourage anyone to try
as it would be a one-way ticket to the mental
institution.

To even split it based on the subject line (the
occurence of the word "school", for example)
would fail for "old-school science fiction" or
whatever.

Over-engineering that wouldn't work and even if
it did would have a dubious benefit.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> When you have a good idea what is you are
> searching form, i.e. remember some unique
> phrase or some other attribute, then folders
> are entirely irrelevant, because you can
> search all of your archives in milliseconds.
> Folders are only of help when you don't have
> a good idea what to search for, and only
> a very vague recollection of the issue you
> want to find.

OK, now the discussion is upside down!
The directory approach is not to facilitate the
user to manually ravage around with the files,
altho that's a positive side-effect.

The directories are used by Gnus to organize
the material so you can access it thru the Gnus
interface!

So for example, I'll just yank mine:

3    alt.tv.survivor                                486  nntp.aioe.org
6    gmane.comp.shells.zsh.devel          1162    44064              
6    gmane.comp.shells.zsh.user            166    18781              
6    gmane.comp.sysutils.docker.devel       43     3365              
3    gmane.comp.sysutils.docker.user              11789              
6    gmane.comp.sysutils.dtrace.user      4921     4921              
6    gmane.comp.video.image-magick.user           22290              
6    gmane.emacs.erc.general                       1454              
3    gmane.emacs.gnus.general                     84345              
3    gmane.emacs.gnus.user                        18887              
6    gmane.emacs.help                     1492   117893              
6    gmane.emacs.w3m                        83     9796              
3  9 gnu.emacs.help                          1     1337  nntp.aioe.org
3  3 mail.misc                                     8466              
6    mail.sent                                     6656              
3    rec.bicycles.tech                             3403  nntp.aioe.org

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> solution.  I've had a look at mu4e but the whole offline IMAP
> construction puts me off a bit.  I always thought it was necessary
> because IMAP is fundamentally just slow, but searching through my mail
> using an Outlook web client is, to my chagrin as a bit of a FOSS
> die-hard, extremely fast.  Does anyone know why that should be?

That's likely because the web-client uses an ad-hoc (and proprietary in
this case) protocol between your computer and the mail server, rather
than IMAP.  So the search is performed on the other side, where the mail
resides, so it's very much like a "local search in an offline-imap
mirror".


        Stefan

Gnus and local mirroring (was: Using R-mail in Emacs)

[Stefan Monnier]

> You could use the gnus agent to keep a local copy of your email and
> search that (or offlineimap, and probably others)

This is the aspect that I think needs work in Gnus: the "normal" way to
work with IMAP should be to keep a local mirror, but the gnus-agent only
keeps a partial mirror (hence not good enough for search, for example),
and offline-imap requires significant extra manual work (and was not
even really well supported by Gnus last time I tried, because if your
local mirror uses maildir, Gnus didn't store the whole metadata in the
Maildir but keeps some in its .newsrc.eld or something like that, so
other clients connecting to the IMAP search aren't told the whole
story).


        Stefan

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>
> Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 14:16:34 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > When you have a good idea what is you are
> > searching form, i.e. remember some unique
> > phrase or some other attribute, then folders
> > are entirely irrelevant, because you can
> > search all of your archives in milliseconds.
> > Folders are only of help when you don't have
> > a good idea what to search for, and only
> > a very vague recollection of the issue you
> > want to find.
> 
> OK, now the discussion is upside down!

No, it's you that changed the subject.  I was talking about email, not
about reading news groups.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I was talking about email, not about reading
> news groups.

That's the beauty of Gnus and Gmane: you can do
mail (mail.misc, mail.sent), mailing lists (as
newsgroups, which are much better, with Gmane,
e.g. gmane.emacs.help), and real, Usenet
newsgroups (gnu.emacs.help, rec.bicycles.tech)
all with the same interface.

You can even do blogs, RSS, and more, but
I have no experience with that.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>
> Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 14:54:19 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > I was talking about email, not about reading
> > news groups.
> 
> That's the beauty of Gnus and Gmane: you can do
> mail (mail.misc, mail.sent), mailing lists (as
> newsgroups, which are much better, with Gmane,
> e.g. gmane.emacs.help), and real, Usenet
> newsgroups (gnu.emacs.help, rec.bicycles.tech)
> all with the same interface.

No interface can ever make email look like a newsgroup.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Vegard Vesterheim]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2018 08:21:49 -0400 Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

>> solution.  I've had a look at mu4e but the whole offline IMAP
>> construction puts me off a bit.  I always thought it was necessary
>> because IMAP is fundamentally just slow, but searching through my mail
>> using an Outlook web client is, to my chagrin as a bit of a FOSS
>> die-hard, extremely fast.  Does anyone know why that should be?
>
> That's likely because the web-client uses an ad-hoc (and proprietary in
> this case) protocol between your computer and the mail server, rather
> than IMAP.  So the search is performed on the other side, where the mail
> resides, so it's very much like a "local search in an offline-imap
> mirror".

I am using Gnus with dovecot as IMAP server. Server-side searching
(using the IMAP SEARCH method) works reasonably well, probably because
Dovecot performs some indexing of incoming mails. Dovecot can also do
full text search indexing via several different search engines, but I
have not tried this. I think the IMAP SEARCH method only works on a
single folder, but with Gnus I can mark several folders and perform a
single search across them.

-- 
- Vegard V -

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> No interface can ever make email look like
> a newsgroup.

    Gmane (pronounced "mane") is an e-mail to
    news gateway. It allows users to access
    electronic mailing lists as if they were
    Usenet newsgroups [...] Since Gmane is
    a bidirectional gateway, it can also be
    used to post on the mailing lists. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmane

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eric S Fraga]

On Friday, 14 Sep 2018 at 11:31, Loris Bennett wrote:
> My problem is that there doesn't seem to be a pure IMAP solution for
> Emacs with which I can search 'in milliseconds'.  A worst case for me is
> more like 10 seconds, although ultimately I can also live with that.

Although it may be something one can live with, I found that I did very
few searches due to the latency.  In my case, 10s was probably the best
case scenario with the office365 exchanger server I have to use for
work.  I've moved to pop3 for that server and use notmuch (from within
gnus, of course) for local searching and it makes *all* the difference.

Knowing that searching works well and efficiently means I have to worry
less about filing/splitting to find what I need when I need it.

-- 
Eric S Fraga via Emacs 27.0.50 & org 9.1.13 on Debian buster/sid

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eric S Fraga]

On Friday, 14 Sep 2018 at 17:05, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> No interface can ever make email look like a newsgroup.

Definitely challenging seeing threads with emails from Outlook/Gmail
users top-posting and including all previous emails... ;-)

-- 
Eric S Fraga via Emacs 27.0.50 & org 9.1.13 on Debian buster/sid

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eric S Fraga]

On Friday, 14 Sep 2018 at 16:02, Eric S Fraga wrote:
> On Friday, 14 Sep 2018 at 17:05, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> No interface can ever make email look like a newsgroup.
>
> Definitely challenging seeing threads with emails from Outlook/Gmail
> users top-posting and including all previous emails... ;-)

To be clear, I was referring to my usual emails, not *this* thread!

-- 
Eric S Fraga via Emacs 27.0.50 & org 9.1.13 on Debian buster/sid

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Filipp Gunbin]

On 14/09/2018 05:40 -0500, Devin Prater wrote:

> I'm still looking for a good way to use Gnus. I have a few email
> addresses, and putting in all the server info is quite a bit of work
> compared to other,non-Emacs clients, like Gmail, Apple Mail, and even
> Outlook. They look at the @domain, like @gmail.com, in the Email
> Address, and just get the server info from that, and its good.
> I know that many probably use their own mail server, or do some
> mystical Emacs stuff to make it faster, but as a person who has come
> from the GUI all his life, but also loves the simple genius of a UI
> and UX that Emacs offers, I'd love to have the option to streamline
> all this, kind of like the setup for ZSH, which is just awesome.,

If you mean sending mail, then gnus-posting-styles helps, here's an
example:

(setq gnus-posting-styles
      '((".*"
	 (address "me@private-server.com")
         ("X-Message-SMTP-Method" "smtp private-server.com 587"))
	("nnfolder\\+mailserver:mail.work"
	 (address "me@work-server.com")
         ("X-Message-SMTP-Method" "smtp work-server.com 587"))))

It will apply these parameters when replying to an article from a group.
Also they are applied when you do `C-u m' with point on a group in Group
buffer.

But they are not applied when forwarding mail, probably I haven't
configured something, or just should file a bug.

Filipp

Re: Gnus and local mirroring

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> You could use the gnus agent to keep a local copy of your email and
>> search that (or offlineimap, and probably others)
>
> This is the aspect that I think needs work in Gnus: the "normal" way to
> work with IMAP should be to keep a local mirror, but the gnus-agent only
> keeps a partial mirror (hence not good enough for search, for example),
> and offline-imap requires significant extra manual work (and was not
> even really well supported by Gnus last time I tried, because if your
> local mirror uses maildir, Gnus didn't store the whole metadata in the
> Maildir but keeps some in its .newsrc.eld or something like that, so
> other clients connecting to the IMAP search aren't told the whole
> story).

Wouldn't this require writing an IMAP server in Elisp? Or I suppose Gnus
could keep the messages in a local maildir, and then do double
operations on the local maildir and the remote server? I don't know what
this would look like, and it sounds fairly difficult.

I agree that Gnus doesn't need to keep its own set of marks in
.newsrc.eld for IMAP servers, it's mostly redundant and prone to sync
errors.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>
> Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 16:38:33 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > No interface can ever make email look like
> > a newsgroup.
> 
>     Gmane (pronounced "mane") is an e-mail to
>     news gateway. It allows users to access
>     electronic mailing lists as if they were
>     Usenet newsgroups [...] Since Gmane is
>     a bidirectional gateway, it can also be
>     used to post on the mailing lists. [1]

We are miscommunicating.  You think I'm talking about protocols,
whereas I'm really talking about the essence and the nature of
communications.  Email and news groups are fundamentally different
mediums, no matter what protocols are used to conduct those
communications.  E.g., there's no private messages in a news group.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> We are miscommunicating. You think I'm
> talking about protocols, whereas I'm really
> talking about the essence and the nature of
> communications. Email and news groups are
> fundamentally different mediums, no matter
> what protocols are used to conduct those
> communications. E.g., there's no private
> messages in a news group.

The awesome and fascinating thing with Gnus is
that you can have all those different channels
of communications available, using different
technologies under the hood, but still
accessing them all from the same program, using
the same interface!

Writing this, in the header section is the
header

    Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help

but if I wanted to, I could add

    Cc: joe-lamer@hackers.com

and hit `C-c C-c'. That would send the message
as a post to gnu.emacs.help , but also as
a mail to Mr. Joe.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Gnus and local mirroring

[Stefan Monnier]

> Wouldn't this require writing an IMAP server in Elisp?

I don't see why.  It might require writing the moral equivalent of
offline-imap, but not an IMAP server, no.


        Stefan

Re: Gnus and local mirroring

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> Wouldn't this require writing an IMAP server in Elisp?
>
> I don't see why.  It might require writing the moral equivalent of
> offline-imap, but not an IMAP server, no.

Yup, I hadn't thought that through completely. But still, re-writing
offline-imap/isync in Elisp is going to be a huge amount of work, and
wouldn't really be usable until we have a solid implementation of
threads/async elisp. And I don't quite see the benefit. My.mbsyncrc file
is 61 lines, and I would expect an equivalent amount of config to make
Gnus do the same thing...

Re: Gnus and local mirroring

[Stefan Monnier]

>>> Wouldn't this require writing an IMAP server in Elisp?
>> I don't see why.  It might require writing the moral equivalent of
>> offline-imap, but not an IMAP server, no.
> Yup, I hadn't thought that through completely. But still, re-writing
> offline-imap/isync in Elisp is going to be a huge amount of work, and
> wouldn't really be usable until we have a solid implementation of
> threads/async elisp. And I don't quite see the benefit. My.mbsyncrc file
> is 61 lines, and I would expect an equivalent amount of config to make
> Gnus do the same thing...

It doesn't really have to be reimplemented, tho.  All it could take is
a bit of automatic config to run offline-imap/mbsync/... since the main
issue is that it should be sufficiently transparent/automatic that it
doesn't require any special config from the other (other than installing
those tools via `apt`, say).


        Stefan

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>
> Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 22:07:47 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > We are miscommunicating. You think I'm
> > talking about protocols, whereas I'm really
> > talking about the essence and the nature of
> > communications. Email and news groups are
> > fundamentally different mediums, no matter
> > what protocols are used to conduct those
> > communications. E.g., there's no private
> > messages in a news group.
> 
> The awesome and fascinating thing with Gnus is
> that you can have all those different channels
> of communications available, using different
> technologies under the hood, but still
> accessing them all from the same program, using
> the same interface!
> 
> Writing this, in the header section is the
> header
> 
>     Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> 
> but if I wanted to, I could add
> 
>     Cc: joe-lamer@hackers.com
> 
> and hit `C-c C-c'. That would send the message
> as a post to gnu.emacs.help , but also as
> a mail to Mr. Joe.

That's exactly my point: Gnus is treating email as a weird kind of a
newsgroup, and that has its limitations.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Gnus is treating email as a weird kind of
> a newsgroup, and that has its limitations.

Gnus has several back ends for mail:

    https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Comparing-Mail-Back-Ends.html

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Gnus and local mirroring

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>>>> Wouldn't this require writing an IMAP server in Elisp?
>>> I don't see why.  It might require writing the moral equivalent of
>>> offline-imap, but not an IMAP server, no.
>> Yup, I hadn't thought that through completely. But still, re-writing
>> offline-imap/isync in Elisp is going to be a huge amount of work, and
>> wouldn't really be usable until we have a solid implementation of
>> threads/async elisp. And I don't quite see the benefit. My.mbsyncrc file
>> is 61 lines, and I would expect an equivalent amount of config to make
>> Gnus do the same thing...
>
> It doesn't really have to be reimplemented, tho.  All it could take is
> a bit of automatic config to run offline-imap/mbsync/... since the main
> issue is that it should be sufficiently transparent/automatic that it
> doesn't require any special config from the other (other than installing
> those tools via `apt`, say).

Okay, interesting. That's worth thinking about.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

> Gnus has several back ends for mail:
>
>     https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Comparing-Mail-Back-Ends.html

Ha! Rmail is mentioned in that file, which is
part of Gnus' documentation.

It seems Rmail first used the equivalent of the
Gnus nnbabyl back end (Babyl) and then, i.e.
now, uses the equivalent of the Gnus nnmbox
back end, mbox (or if you prefer it, the other
way around, because Babyl and mbox were there
before Gnus).

OK, so RMS wrote Rmail! I suppose this partly
explains the wierd quote that "Rmail is the
primary Emacs mail-reader." [1]

Anyway:

nnbabyl
    Once upon a time, there was the DEC-10 and
    DEC-20, running operating systems called
    TOPS and related things, and the usual
    (only?) mail reading environment was
    a thing called Babyl. I don't know what
    format was used for mail landing on the
    system, but Babyl had its own internal
    format to which mail was converted,
    primarily involving creating
    a spool-file-like entity with a scheme for
    inserting Babyl-specific headers and status
    bits above the top of each message in the
    file. Rmail was Emacs's first mail reader,
    it was written by Richard Stallman, and
    Stallman came out of that TOPS/Babyl
    environment, so he wrote Rmail to
    understand the mail files folks already had
    in existence. Gnus (and VM, for that
    matter) continue to support this format
    because it's perceived as having some good
    qualities in those mailer-specific
    headers/status bits stuff. Rmail itself
    still exists as well, of course, and is
    still maintained within Emacs. Since Emacs
    23, it uses standard mbox format rather
    than Babyl.
   
    Both of the above forms leave your mail in
    a single file on your file system, and they
    must parse that entire file each time you
    take a look at your mail. [2]

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-09/msg00328.html

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Comparing-Mail-Back-Ends.html

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

The comment from RMS [1] previously mentioned
was based on a misconception: just before he
said that, it was brought up that few people
use Rmail (or RMAIL), but this was said in the
context of ~"this will make it difficult to
have a lot of people testing it", not to say
Rmail was unimportant because few people were
using it, which was RMS' interpretation.

So maybe the comment of Rmail being the
"primary" mail-reader for Emacs was a stretch,
because he, for the wrong reason, felt the need
to defend it?

BTW that whole thread was discussing the
transition from Babyl to mbox for Rmail, and
how to get it tested before a release!

Anyway here is some more interesting stuff:

Alex Schroeder writes:

    Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

        I think it needs to be tested at least
        a little before we put it in the trunk.
        I don't know if anyone has actually used
        it yet.

    Our problem is that many people use Gnus
    for their mail. On #emacs, most people
    recommend to use Gnus when newbies ask for
    mail within Emacs. Can we look specifically
    for RMAIL users willing to help us test?
    We could ask on the newsgroups, for
    example. I will ask on #emacs... [2]

A big problem indeed :) Also note the "We could
ask on the newsgroups" ... :)

RMS again:

    The one time I tried to start Gnus (to read
    news), it was so much hassle when starting
    up that I killed it. I recommend use of
    Rmail to read mail. [3]

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-09/msg00328.html

[2] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-09/msg00313.html

[3] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-09/msg00363.html

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Bob Proulx]

Emanuel Berg wrote:
> So maybe the comment of Rmail being the
> "primary" mail-reader for Emacs was a stretch,
> because he, for the wrong reason, felt the need
> to defend it?

When I was using emacs-rmail back in the 1990s it was the only mailer
client available as I recall.  And it used Babyl format files only at
that time.  But then emacs-vm appeared and I switched to using
emacs-vm and found it a lot better for many reasons.  I didn't look at
the version history but back in those earlier days I think rmail was
considered the standard emacs mail reader.  Here it is 30 years later
and I am no longer using either but have been using mutt happily for
years.

And I have had similar experiences with gnus for, well, newsgroups.  I
am currently using gnus to read news but I don't really like it.  It
is very arcane by comparison to other newsreaders that I have used.
And here I am quite a hard core long time emacs user but I don't find
gnus to be a very good interface.  I am just trying to use it because
it is a long term emacs interface.  But I find doing even simple
things quite difficult to impossible.  I would never recommend gnus
for email.

Bob

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Bob Newell]

Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> writes:

> And I have had similar experiences with gnus for, well, newsgroups.  I
> am currently using gnus to read news but I don't really like it.  It
> is very arcane by comparison to other newsreaders that I have used.
> And here I am quite a hard core long time emacs user but I don't find
> gnus to be a very good interface.  I am just trying to use it because
> it is a long term emacs interface.  But I find doing even simple
> things quite difficult to impossible.  I would never recommend gnus
> for email.

I can understand the pain. When I attempted the switch from viewmail
(vm) to gnus, it was ... what am I doing to myself? But ...

Gnus takes a lot of patience, really a lot. It starts to pay off,
though. When I integrated BBDB that was a huge leap forward, and many
things became possible that were difficult with other clients. I would
say, though, that it took me months to get to that stage, and years to
get to where I am now, where gnus is part of my regular workflow and is
virtually indispensible.

I think a lot of people just don't want to go to that much trouble (or
are not fanatical enough[1], take your pick), and I completely get that,
when something like Gmail's web client is really easy to use and is
quickly learned.

You mentioned mutt--- that certainly works quite well (I use it once in
a while when in a rush and not wanting to start up Emacs) although it
just doesn't have the flexibility and sheer power of Gnus (but you never
said it did).

Gnus plays to a niche audience of devotees. As someone further up in
this now long thread pointed out, there isn't much it can't do (though
"do it easily" was definitely not claimed).

Aloha from Hawai`i nei,

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i
* Via Gnus/BBDB/Org/Emacs/Linux *

[1] I read email on my Android phone with Gnus. That is /definitely/ fanatical.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Bob Proulx wrote:

> [...] I don't find gnus to be a very good
> interface. I am just trying to use it because
> it is a long term emacs interface. But I find
> doing even simple things quite difficult to
> impossible. I would never recommend gnus
> for email.

Why not?

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Bob Newell wrote:

> Gnus plays to a niche audience of devotees.
> As someone further up in this now long thread
> pointed out, there isn't much it can't do
> (though "do it easily" was definitely not
> claimed).

What exactly do you want from an e-mail client?

If one would make a list of ten things it is
expected to do, and those things are normal
things like compose, send and read mail, then
I dare say Gnus can do those things with
a minimal config file (.gnus or a subset of
.emacs) to just pinpoint the servers, e-mail,
and so.

I mean, some people say, ~"I spent years on
Gnus". Well, so did I! But I don't think I did
this because there was anything wrong with Gnus
to begin with. I spent years on Emacs as well,
not because it was bad, but because it
was good! (and now it is even better)

Why would I/we do that to a lousy piece of
software to begin with?

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>
> Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2018 18:06:10 +0200
> 
> What exactly do you want from an e-mail client?
> 
> If one would make a list of ten things it is
> expected to do, and those things are normal
> things like compose, send and read mail

When we talk about an email client, we talk only about reading mail.
Composing email and sending it are not parts of the email client, they
are separate packages.  For example, composing email can be (and is by
default) done by message.el even if Rmail is the email client.  And
you can send using the same smtpmail.el package regardless of the
email client and the compose package.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> When we talk about an email client, we talk
> only about reading mail. Composing email and
> sending it are not parts of the email client,
> they are separate packages. For example,
> composing email can be (and is by default)
> done by message.el even if Rmail is the email
> client. And you can send using the same
> smtpmail.el package regardless of the email
> client and the compose package.

Well then, I don't see why Gnus cannot do that
just as easily as Rmail or any other client.

BTW message.el is part of Gnus:

    ;;; message.el --- composing mail and news messages

    ;; Copyright (C) 1996-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

    ;; Author: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
    ;; Keywords: mail, news

    [...]

    ;; This mode provides mail-sending
    ;; facilities from within Emacs.
    ;; It consists mainly of large chunks of
    ;; code from the sendmail.el, gnus-msg.el
    ;; and rnewspost.el files.

I have it in:

    /usr/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/gnus/message.el.gz

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>
> Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2018 20:05:21 +0200
> 
> BTW message.el is part of Gnus:

It was originally developed as part of Gnus, yes.  But nowadays,
simple.el says:

  (defcustom mail-user-agent 'message-user-agent

And if you try typing "C-x m" in "emacs -Q", you will be placed in
message composition buffer under message-mode, even though Gnus is
nowhere in sight.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Bob Newell]

> Why would I/we do that to a lousy piece of
> software to begin with?

Because Gnus is a great piece of software, which at least IMHO
requires effort but in the end greatly rewards that effort.

Yes, you can copy/edit a basic config and get Gnus running pretty
quickly if you're at least somewhat conversant with elisp. But to
really benefit from all Gnus has to offer, it will take time and
effort, and maybe some pain. If you just want the basics of the
basics, rmail is very easy to get started with. But Gnus offers so
much.

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i

Via Linux/Emacs/Gnus/BBDB.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> It was originally developed as part of Gnus,
> yes. But nowadays, simple.el says:
>
>   (defcustom mail-user-agent 'message-user-agent
>
> And if you try typing "C-x m" in "emacs -Q",
> you will be placed in message composition
> buffer under message-mode, even though Gnus
> is nowhere in sight.

OK, I got this finally sorted out. If one is
sending e-mail from Emacs, one is using Gnus.
But that doesn't matter because the concept of
an e-mail client doesn't include the composing
of e-mails, only the reading of them. Bam!

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Bob Newell wrote:

> Yes, you can copy/edit a basic config and get
> Gnus running pretty quickly if you're at
> least somewhat conversant with elisp. But to
> really benefit from all Gnus has to offer, it
> will take time and effort, and maybe
> some pain.

Well, I'n my case, the digits don't lie. [1]
But most of that has been changes to the looks
of Gnus, with shortcuts and other changes to
the interface (e.g., single buttons to open
specific directories and newsgroups) and some
experimental, supposedly cool stuff that
worked (?) but were seldom used.

If this is what every Gnuser do, perhaps we
should have a GNU GELPA as well as the ELPA
and MELPAs?

[1]

$ ~/.emacs.d/emacs-init/gnus wc -l *.el

  148 article.el
   32 browse.el
   17 gnus-faces.el
   79 gnus-my.el
  108 group.el
   31 group-restore.el
   22 group-summary.el
   69 mail.el
   52 mailrc.el
   29 mail-to-many.el
  122 message-my.el
  112 moggle.el
   34 server.el
   95 summary.el
  950 total

http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/gnus/

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>
> Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2018 23:44:46 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > It was originally developed as part of Gnus,
> > yes. But nowadays, simple.el says:
> >
> >   (defcustom mail-user-agent 'message-user-agent
> >
> > And if you try typing "C-x m" in "emacs -Q",
> > you will be placed in message composition
> > buffer under message-mode, even though Gnus
> > is nowhere in sight.
> 
> OK, I got this finally sorted out. If one is
> sending e-mail from Emacs, one is using Gnus.

Not Gnus, message-mode.  That message.el lives in the lisp/gnus
directory doesn't mean it cannot be used without any relation to Gnus.

> But that doesn't matter because the concept of
> an e-mail client doesn't include the composing
> of e-mails, only the reading of them. Bam!

Exactly.  The relation to Gnus/Rmail ends when you invoke the reply
command (or any similar commands): those invoke message.el (or any
other user-agent package -- we have at least one other in Emacs) as
appropriate for replying to a received message; then they let
message-mode do its job.

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Not Gnus, message-mode. That message.el lives
> in the lisp/gnus directory doesn't mean it
> cannot be used without any relation to Gnus.

It is in the Gnus directory. It is written by
Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen. There are 43 hits on
"Gnus" and 199 hits on "gnus" in that file.
(Compared to 1 and 30 for "Rmail" and
"rmail", respectively.)

But it isn't Gnus, and it isn't part of the
e-mail client (its keywords are "mail, news")
so Rmail users can use it, sleeping well at
night knowing they still aren't relying on any
software from BIG GNUS.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Bob Proulx]

Bob Newell wrote:
> Bob Proulx writes:
> > ...  But I find doing even simple things quite difficult to
> > impossible.  I would never recommend gnus for email.
> 
> I can understand the pain. When I attempted the switch from viewmail
> (vm) to gnus, it was ... what am I doing to myself? But ...
> 
> Gnus takes a lot of patience, really a lot. It starts to pay off,
> though. When I integrated BBDB that was a huge leap forward, and many
> things became possible that were difficult with other clients.

Adding BBDB would be a significant increase in functionality.  I can
see where in combination that it would be very powerful.

> I would say, though, that it took me months to get to that stage,
> and years to get to where I am now, where gnus is part of my regular
> workflow and is virtually indispensible.

I would love to see you write a tutorial article on how you set up and
more importantly how you use gnus and bbdb in your environment.  That
would be really useful! :-)

> I think a lot of people just don't want to go to that much trouble (or
> are not fanatical enough[1], take your pick), and I completely get that,
> when something like Gmail's web client is really easy to use and is
> quickly learned.

Yes.  The seductively easy interface is like the dark side of the
force.  If it pulls you in then there is no recovery.

  The gates of hell are open night and day.
  Smooth the descent and easy the way.
  But to come back, to cheerful skies,
  in this the task and mighty labor lies.
    --Virgil, Aeneid, iv. 128. (Dryden, Trans.)

> You mentioned mutt--- that certainly works quite well (I use it once in
> a while when in a rush and not wanting to start up Emacs) although it
> just doesn't have the flexibility and sheer power of Gnus (but you never
> said it did).

I understand your view that gnus+bbdb+additionals is very powerful.  I
would love to get to that point.  But on the other side of things mutt
is also extremely powerful and very fast.  Mutt is by far the fastest
mail client I have ever used.  And also the most powerful.  Especially
the search capability.

In mutt I will often look for something.  I remember that I was in the
conversation.  I limit the view to only threads that I participated.
Then I will remember a unique word or tag or concept that was in there
somewhere and search for it.  Often in conjuction with a header or
some other criteria.  Or other combinations.  I almost always find
what I am looking for in the first search and the response is always
almost immediate.  Very fast.  Very powerful.

It seems to me that you and I could each give a glowing advocacy for
each of our respective tools and the process would sound about the
same.  But in each case we would have a different tool named. :-)

> Gnus plays to a niche audience of devotees. As someone further up in
> this now long thread pointed out, there isn't much it can't do (though
> "do it easily" was definitely not claimed).

At some point I will get a little bit of time and get back into
reading newsgroups.  Using gnus.  It has been just long enough that I
will need to review the keybindings again.  And at that time there
will be basic actions that I think would make perfect sense but will
be difficult to do.  I'll write up my experience with it and kindly
ask you to review it and teach me the error of my ways.

The problem is almost certainly one of documentation.  If I could
figure it out without looking at the source code but only from reading
documentation then I would be happier using it and could possibly
recommend it.  It is possible that simply with improvements to the
gnus info and the emacs wiki pages that all could be resolved. :-)

Bob

Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> writes:

> Bob Newell wrote:
>> Bob Proulx writes:
>> > ...  But I find doing even simple things quite difficult to
>> > impossible.  I would never recommend gnus for email.
>> 
>> I can understand the pain. When I attempted the switch from viewmail
>> (vm) to gnus, it was ... what am I doing to myself? But ...
>> 
>> Gnus takes a lot of patience, really a lot. It starts to pay off,
>> though. When I integrated BBDB that was a huge leap forward, and many
>> things became possible that were difficult with other clients.
>
> Adding BBDB would be a significant increase in functionality.  I can
> see where in combination that it would be very powerful.
>
>> I would say, though, that it took me months to get to that stage,
>> and years to get to where I am now, where gnus is part of my regular
>> workflow and is virtually indispensible.
>
> I would love to see you write a tutorial article on how you set up and
> more importantly how you use gnus and bbdb in your environment.  That
> would be really useful! :-)
>
>> I think a lot of people just don't want to go to that much trouble (or
>> are not fanatical enough[1], take your pick), and I completely get that,
>> when something like Gmail's web client is really easy to use and is
>> quickly learned.
>
> Yes.  The seductively easy interface is like the dark side of the
> force.  If it pulls you in then there is no recovery.
>
>   The gates of hell are open night and day.
>   Smooth the descent and easy the way.
>   But to come back, to cheerful skies,
>   in this the task and mighty labor lies.
>     --Virgil, Aeneid, iv. 128. (Dryden, Trans.)
>
>> You mentioned mutt--- that certainly works quite well (I use it once in
>> a while when in a rush and not wanting to start up Emacs) although it
>> just doesn't have the flexibility and sheer power of Gnus (but you never
>> said it did).
>
> I understand your view that gnus+bbdb+additionals is very powerful.  I
> would love to get to that point.  But on the other side of things mutt
> is also extremely powerful and very fast.  Mutt is by far the fastest
> mail client I have ever used.  And also the most powerful.  Especially
> the search capability.
>
> In mutt I will often look for something.  I remember that I was in the
> conversation.  I limit the view to only threads that I participated.
> Then I will remember a unique word or tag or concept that was in there
> somewhere and search for it.  Often in conjuction with a header or
> some other criteria.  Or other combinations.  I almost always find
> what I am looking for in the first search and the response is always
> almost immediate.  Very fast.  Very powerful.
>
> It seems to me that you and I could each give a glowing advocacy for
> each of our respective tools and the process would sound about the
> same.  But in each case we would have a different tool named. :-)
>
>> Gnus plays to a niche audience of devotees. As someone further up in
>> this now long thread pointed out, there isn't much it can't do (though
>> "do it easily" was definitely not claimed).
>
> At some point I will get a little bit of time and get back into
> reading newsgroups.  Using gnus.  It has been just long enough that I
> will need to review the keybindings again.  And at that time there
> will be basic actions that I think would make perfect sense but will
> be difficult to do.  I'll write up my experience with it and kindly
> ask you to review it and teach me the error of my ways.
>
> The problem is almost certainly one of documentation.  If I could
> figure it out without looking at the source code but only from reading
> documentation then I would be happier using it and could possibly
> recommend it.  It is possible that simply with improvements to the
> gnus info and the emacs wiki pages that all could be resolved. :-)

If you have suggestions for improving the Gnus documentation, open them
as bug reports!