Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[nljlistbox2@gmail.com (N. Jackson)]

James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> writes:

> Well done because I found Gnus difficult to set up... and gave up.

As far as using it is a mail client I gave up too (temporarily) the
first time around. But after using it as a newsreader essentially as it
came out of the box for several months, and gradually tweaking it to my
liking, when I revisited using it as a mail client this month, things
seemed an awful lot easier than they did back in the summer.

(I'm not done yet though. The next challenge is outbound mail -- setting
it up to let me choose between multiple smtp servers.)

Part of the problem with it, I think, is that there's no easy way to
approach the manual -- wherever you start you seem to be coming in in
the middle.

> I used Alpine which reads the server well and works fine with
> emacs... for me and my more limited abilites.

I did consider Alpine. I used Pine on a palmtop for many years and it
was quite adequate, so Alpine seemed a plausible choice. I don't recall
why I rejected it. I thought it was because I couldn't see in the manual
how to set it up to use an external editor, but if you used it with
Emacs, I must be mistaken about that. Still, I think I'll be a lot
happier with the power and flexibility of Gnus now that I almost have it
tamed!

N.