Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough]

Okay, so I'm seriously considering switching from Thunderbird to Emacs 
(under Windows XP) for my mail and calendar needs, but I haven't used 
Emacs for either of these purposes in so long I don't know if it's 
feasible, nor am I certain which modes are "best".  I'm hoping that some 
of you can point me in the right direction.  I'd "just do it" as a test, 
but I'd rather not go through a crap ton of hassle and problems only to 
hear later "You should not have used foo mode for that, bar mode is what 
you want".

If you've got a bit of spare time and want to know my specific desires 
more deeply, please see the PS.

Thanks!

Jeff

P.S.

I need a fairly small number of features:

1.  It needs to work on Windows XP without having to install a 
unix/posix environment like Cygwin.  I *am* willing to install discrete 
utilities if necessary (if Emacs doesn't do POP on its own and needs 
some external program to do it, for instance).

2.  I have just under seven thousand messages in various folders (mbox 
files) that I'll be wanting to keep, so it needs to not choke and die 
when confronted with "many" messages.

3.  I need to have my calendar appointments either in my face at all 
times (I can live with it being in a split window or a new frame I just 
leave open) or have the alarms/reminders be insistent and arbitrarily 
settable (remind me 15 minutes in advance for this appointment and 30 
minutes before this one).  I have a lot of appointments and a very bad 
memory for these sorts of things.

4.  Reading HTML messages should be possible, but my needs here are 
minimal.  I'll settle for what Lynx looked like circa 1995.  I just need 
the message to be legible.

The things I'm hoping to get from moving to Emacs:

1.  The ability to stay in Emacs for more of my tasks and use its 
editing commands which are now so ingrained into my hands there's no 
hope of going back.

2.  The ability to search for messages and have the results be what I 
want.  That means finding all the messages with my search string and 
*not* finding messages that don't have my search string.  I thought this 
is what "Search" implied, but Thunderbird has its own ideas.

3.  The ability to use the keyboard for marking messages as read, 
deleting messages, moving them around, etc.  A lot of this stuff is 
relegated to the mouse and switching from mouse to keyboard and back is 
getting really special annoying.

Things I don't need:

1.  I don't use newsgroups or to-do lists.

2.  I don't care about in-line attachments and would prefer not to see 
them anyway.  As long as I can pull them out of the message and save 
them somewhere sane, that works for me.

3.  Bonus points if I can diddle a link in an email message and have 
Emacs bring it up in Firefox, but I'm not married to it.

Thanks for listening!

-- 

Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Bastien]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> Okay, so I'm seriously considering switching from Thunderbird to Emacs
> (under Windows XP) for my mail and calendar needs, but I haven't used
> Emacs for either of these purposes in so long I don't know if it's
> feasible, nor am I certain which modes are "best".  I'm hoping that some
> of you can point me in the right direction.  I'd "just do it" as a test,
> but I'd rather not go through a crap ton of hassle and problems only to
> hear later "You should not have used foo mode for that, bar mode is what
> you want".

Check Gnus and Org.

http://gnus.org/manual.html
http://orgmode.org/

> 1.  It needs to work on Windows XP without having to install a
> unix/posix environment like Cygwin.  I *am* willing to install discrete
> utilities if necessary (if Emacs doesn't do POP on its own and needs
> some external program to do it, for instance).

AFAIK Emacs + Gnus works fine under Windows.

> 2.  I have just under seven thousand messages in various folders (mbox
> files) that I'll be wanting to keep, so it needs to not choke and die
> when confronted with "many" messages.

It's okay.  

> 3.  I need to have my calendar appointments either in my face at all
> times (I can live with it being in a split window or a new frame I just
> leave open) or have the alarms/reminders be insistent and arbitrarily
> settable (remind me 15 minutes in advance for this appointment and 30
> minutes before this one).  I have a lot of appointments and a very bad
> memory for these sorts of things.

Org is the tool you want, it's highly configurable.

> 4.  Reading HTML messages should be possible, but my needs here are
> minimal.  I'll settle for what Lynx looked like circa 1995.  I just need
> the message to be legible.

Gnus can be configured to read HTML messages.

> The things I'm hoping to get from moving to Emacs:
>
> 1.  The ability to stay in Emacs for more of my tasks and use its
> editing commands which are now so ingrained into my hands there's no
> hope of going back.

You will enjoy more Emacs-power after the switch. 

> 2.  The ability to search for messages and have the results be what I
> want.  That means finding all the messages with my search string and
> *not* finding messages that don't have my search string.  I thought this
> is what "Search" implied, but Thunderbird has its own ideas.

Maybe that's the hardest part of your request.

Under GNU/Linux, mairix (http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/) makes
it very easy to search and find messages and Gnus has an interface to it
(http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_43.html#SEC43).  

But mairix requires Cygwin to run under Windows. 

You can also check Mew (http://www.mew.org) -- it's another mail reader
for Emacs, with many more integrated search facilities than Gnus.

> 3.  The ability to use the keyboard for marking messages as read,
> deleting messages, moving them around, etc.  A lot of this stuff is
> relegated to the mouse and switching from mouse to keyboard and back is
> getting really special annoying.

Gnus handles all this.

> Things I don't need:
>
> 1.  I don't use newsgroups or to-do lists.

Don't use these functions, then.

> 2.  I don't care about in-line attachments and would prefer not to see
> them anyway.  As long as I can pull them out of the message and save
> them somewhere sane, that works for me.

Same.

> 3.  Bonus points if I can diddle a link in an email message and have
> Emacs bring it up in Firefox, but I'm not married to it.

Feasible.

HTH,

-- 
 Bastien

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[notbob]

On 2009-09-09, Bastien <bastienguerry@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> AFAIK Emacs + Gnus works fine under Windows.

Not my experience.  I was never ever able to get gnus for newsgroups
the work right under XP.  I finally gave up and installed linux.  A
much better solution all around.  ;)

nb  

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Sébastien Vauban]

Hi,

notbob wrote:
> On 2009-09-09, Bastien <bastienguerry-gM/Ye1E23mwN+BqQ9rBEUg@public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>
>> AFAIK Emacs + Gnus works fine under Windows.
>
> Not my experience. I was never ever able to get gnus for newsgroups the work
> right under XP. I finally gave up and installed linux. A much better
> solution all around. ;)

Not my experience. I was able to use Gnus (yes, the best AFAIK) email under
Windows XP for years. Now, I've switched to Linux for openness reasons, but I
still have colleagues using Gnus with MS OS (even Vista and Windows 7)...

Seb

-- 
Sébastien Vauban

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[ken]

On 09/09/2009 03:18 AM Sébastien Vauban wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> notbob wrote:
>> On 2009-09-09, Bastien <bastienguerry@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>> AFAIK Emacs + Gnus works fine under Windows.
>> Not my experience. I was never ever able to get gnus for newsgroups the work
>> right under XP. I finally gave up and installed linux. A much better
>> solution all around. ;)
> 
> Not my experience. I was able to use Gnus (yes, the best AFAIK) email under
> Windows XP for years. Now, I've switched to Linux for openness reasons, but I
> still have colleagues using Gnus with MS OS (even Vista and Windows 7)...
> 
> Seb
> 

Totally with you on the second: Linux is more fun and more flexible and
stable than any Windows OS I've ever used (and that's been a lot of them).

But gnus has been problemmatic for me.  I have multiple email accounts
which I access using imaps (running on different servers).  Setting
these all up and managing them is a snap with Thunderbird.  On the other
hand, I've spend *days* trying to get gnus to do the same and never did
get them anything close to working.  So I gave up.  There's too many
other things in my life to do.  If there's ever clear and accurate
enough documentation on doing this, I might attempt it again.

(But then, how does gnus handle html-formatted emails with images (e.g.,
photos)...?  PDFs?)

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Tassilo Horn]

Bastien <bastienguerry@googlemail.com> writes:

Hi!

>> Okay, so I'm seriously considering switching from Thunderbird to Emacs
>> (under Windows XP) for my mail and calendar needs, but I haven't used
>> Emacs for either of these purposes in so long I don't know if it's
>> feasible, nor am I certain which modes are "best".  I'm hoping that some
>> of you can point me in the right direction.  I'd "just do it" as a test,
>> but I'd rather not go through a crap ton of hassle and problems only to
>> hear later "You should not have used foo mode for that, bar mode is what
>> you want".
>
> Check Gnus and Org.

Seconded.

>> 2.  I have just under seven thousand messages in various folders
>> (mbox files) that I'll be wanting to keep, so it needs to not choke
>> and die when confronted with "many" messages.
>
> It's okay.  

But I don't know if mbox is the best backend for huge mailboxes.  You
might want to consider installing a local IMAP server instead.

If that's not possible, maybe the nnml backend is the preferred
alternative for gnus.

>> 4.  Reading HTML messages should be possible, but my needs here are
>> minimal.  I'll settle for what Lynx looked like circa 1995.  I just
>> need the message to be legible.
>
> Gnus can be configured to read HTML messages.

Yes, especially if it can use the w3m text browser + emacs-w3m to render
the messages.  w3m would need to be installed separately, but I don't
know if it works on Windows.

>> 2.  The ability to search for messages and have the results be what I
>> want.  That means finding all the messages with my search string and
>> *not* finding messages that don't have my search string.  I thought
>> this is what "Search" implied, but Thunderbird has its own ideas.
>
> Maybe that's the hardest part of your request.
>
> Under GNU/Linux, mairix (http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/)
> makes it very easy to search and find messages and Gnus has an
> interface to it (http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_43.html#SEC43).
>
> But mairix requires Cygwin to run under Windows.

I store all my mails in a local IMAP server.  That server supports
indexing of mails, and using Gnus nnir backend I can quickly search for
mails.

Bye,
Tassilo

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Sébastien Vauban]

ken,

ken wrote:
> On 09/09/2009 03:18 AM Sébastien Vauban wrote:
>> notbob wrote:
>>> On 2009-09-09, Bastien <bastienguerry-gM/Ye1E23mwN+BqQ9rBEUg@public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> AFAIK Emacs + Gnus works fine under Windows.
>>>
>>> Not my experience. I was never ever able to get gnus for newsgroups the work
>>> right under XP. I finally gave up and installed linux. A much better
>>> solution all around. ;)
>>
>> Not my experience. I was able to use Gnus (yes, the best AFAIK) email under
>> Windows XP for years. Now, I've switched to Linux for openness reasons, but
>> I still have colleagues using Gnus with MS OS (even Vista and Windows 7)...
>
> But gnus has been problemmatic for me. I have multiple email accounts which
> I access using imaps (running on different servers). Setting these all up
> and managing them is a snap with Thunderbird. On the other hand, I've spend
> *days* trying to get gnus to do the same and never did get them anything
> close to working. So I gave up. There's too many other things in my life to
> do.

It's true that setting up everything takes some time. But, once it's done, you
can go wherever (to client sites) with your config file and get the same level
of functionality as you had on your first PC.

I am using Gnus for accessing the company IMAP server and different newsgroups
(from our provider and from Gname).


> If there's ever clear and accurate enough documentation on doing this, I
> might attempt it again.

My goal is to get my .gnus file published on the Web, for helping people (the
same way I got helped by looking at other's config files).

Though, I need to get my private stuff removed from this file. Not yet done.
Could be in a couple of weeks from now.


> (But then, how does gnus handle html-formatted emails with images (e.g.,
> photos)...?  PDFs?)

Not a prob'.

Inlined photos are just seeable directly in the buffers.

The same for HTML (with emacs-w3m and the w3m browser available from Cygwin).
For HTML with Java inside, just K H to fire up Firefox with the mail
contents...

PDF are normal links. Just clicking on them opens up SumatraPDF under Windows
or okular under Linux.

All of that in one config file, usable under both Windows and Linux, without
any change. Just conditional setup.

Seb

-- 
Sébastien Vauban

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Andreas Politz]

ken <gebser@mousecar.com> writes:

> But gnus has been problemmatic for me.  I have multiple email accounts
> which I access using imaps (running on different servers).  Setting
> these all up and managing them is a snap with Thunderbird.  On the other
> hand, I've spend *days* trying to get gnus to do the same and never did
> get them anything close to working.  So I gave up.  There's too many
> other things in my life to do.  If there's ever clear and accurate
> enough documentation on doing this, I might attempt it again.
>

Agree, for one the manual is more like a references. Also, it frequently
introduces terms without explaining them properly (e.g. active group).

Until I understood most of it's concepts, gnus got totally confused (from me
killing groups, creating new groups with the same name, changing
methods will it was running,etc. ) and it appeared to be broken.

After I figured out the setup, I deleted everything gnus (News,
.newsrc.eld, .newsrc, .newsrc-dribble) and now it's working.

Actually you just have to setup a imap method (server) and subscribe to
a group (folder) on that server.

There appears to be no difference between primary and secondary
method, though I really don't know. This will ignore the primary
one.

(setq gnus-select-method '(nnnil ""))

Setup the imap servers. The list pattern is only necessary if the
server makes a lot of folders available you are not interested in,
e.g. a whole file-system.

(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
      '((nnimap "imap.host1.net"
                (nnimap-list-pattern "Mail/*"))
        (nnimap "imap.host2.net")))

Start gnus

(gnus)

Go to server buffer.  Move point to one of the servers and go into
it.  Press `u' on the folders you want to read.  Quit server. Quit
server buffer. Update all groups

^ RET u q q g

This is with Gnus v5.13.



> (But then, how does gnus handle html-formatted emails with images (e.g.,
> photos)...?  PDFs?)

I haven't gotten any HTML mail lately. Attachments are represented as
usual via link, by which they can be opened in different ways.

-ap

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Torsten Mueller]

Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> wrote:

> Yes, especially if it can use the w3m text browser + emacs-w3m to
> render the messages. w3m would need to be installed separately, but
> I don't know if it works on Windows.

It does, very well.

T.M.

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Andreas Politz]

Torsten Mueller <dev-null@shared-files.de> writes:

> Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> wrote:
>
>> Yes, especially if it can use the w3m text browser + emacs-w3m to
>> render the messages. w3m would need to be installed separately, but
>> I don't know if it works on Windows.
>
> It does, very well.
>
Is there are binary to be found somewhere ?

-ap

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Torsten Mueller]

Andreas Politz <politza@fh-trier.de> wrote:

> > > Yes, especially if it can use the w3m text browser + emacs-w3m
> > > to render the messages. w3m would need to be installed
> > > separately, but I don't know if it works on Windows.
> >
> > It does, very well.
>
> Is there are binary to be found somewhere ?

http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/pc/gnuwin32/cygwin/mirrors/cygnus/release/w3m/w3m-0.5.1-2.tar.bz2

This binary is compiled for cygwin but the package is standalone. This
means it contains all the required dlls. You will not have to install
a complete cygwin environment. Just unpack and run w3m.exe.

For use with emacs you will need to install the emacs-w3m package.
You will have to configure some things in .emacs:

1. The path to the binary:

(setq w3m-command "c:/usr/local/w3m-0.5.1-2/bin/w3m.exe")

2. The load-path to the lisp directory:

(setq load-path	(append load-path '("c:/usr/local/emacs-22.2.1/site-lisp/w3m/lisp")))

3. Load the w3m lisp module:

(load-library "w3m.elc")

Note: This line in a .emacs will slow down the startup process
dramatically. Perhaps it's a better way to put this into a function
("load-w3m" or similar) and call this on demand (M-x load-w3m).

4. And if you use Gnus - set w3m to render your HTML mails:

(setq mm-text-html-renderer 'w3m
      mm-inline-text-html-with-images t
      mm-inline-large-images t
)

If everthing goes well you can just type M-x w3m for browsing www.

T.M.

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> Okay, I've looked at Gnus, as well as VM and have some questions.  I'm 
> also having a weird problem in trying just to send mail from Emacs.  See 
> below if you'd like to know more and think you can help out.  I'm still 
> looking for any other packages people actually use for email in emacs 
> under windows so don't be shy!  On the calendar front, I'll be giving 
> org-mode the once over later today.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Jeff
>
> P.S.
>
> Gnus
>
> I've looked at Gnus.  It uses the "paradigm" of newsgroups for 
> everything.  I'd rather not have to retrain my brain for something as 
> trivial as reading email, but let's just say I'm willing.  Is there a 

Theres nothing to retrain. You see a "group" and your email is in
there. No paradigm shift at all.

> way to see "I do not have an NNTP server, so please don't bother me 
> about it anymore"?  It looks like I can set a variable so that gnus will 
> ignore the email side of things, but I can't find something similar for 
> news.

Just dont subscribe to any news groups.

>
> VM
>
> I've also taken a glance at VM and would like to go further, but I see 
> no direct evidence that it works with Emacs 22.x.  Is anyone using VM 
> with a recent Emacs on Windows XP?
>
> Sending Mail
>
> In the process of all this looking, I decided to try to get *sending* 
> mail to work.  I hear tell from this faq 
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/Network-access.html) that 
> emacs can "talk directly to SMTP mail servers" via smtpmail.el.  I 
> stuffed the following in my .emacs:
>
> (setq user-full-name "Your full name")
> (setq user-mail-address "Your@email.address")
> (setq smtpmail-default-smtp-server "domain.name.of.your.smtp.server")
>      
> (setq send-mail-command 'smtpmail-send-it) ; For mail-mode (Rmail)
>
>
> Did C-x m, wrote stuff, did C-c C-c and promptly got a Thunderbird 
> window popping up the message (well, actually it told me to paste the 
> message in because the text had been conveniently dropped on my 
> clipboard, thankfully obliterating what was there before).  Is there a 
> way to stop this from happening and for Emacs to just send it itself?  
> "Talk directly to SMTP mail servers" doesn't mean "Fire up another 
> application" in my opinion.

Never heard of anything like that before. Emacs doesn't launch
thunderbird.

>
> Still looking for suggestions/experiences with other mail packages, and 
> am planning to give org-mode the once over later today.  Thanks for 
> getting me pointed in the right direction!
>
> P.P.S.

>
> Before anyone seriously suggests moving to linux as a solution to my 
> problem (which seems dangerously near), let me just clarify something.  
> I'm well aware of my options in that regard and am very familiar with 
> all things *nixen.  Switching from Windows XP to *nix for email is not 
> going to happen.  Not at all.  And I'm not interested in explaining why 
> I won't or listening to why I should.
>
> Installing, configuring and maintaining an IMAP server in order to read 
> and search my mail is also not going to happen.  An ancient version of 
> Eudora on my dad's old Mac LC could let me read my mail, *and* find my 
> messages, without having to run such a thing.  And it did it for 
> thousands of messages without flinching.  If a piece of software here in 
> the modern world can't handle it, the answer is to not use that
> software.

Gnus is possibly the most powerful email/usenet client out there. And
quite why you seem to think people would suggest you move to Linux for
your email client is rather baffling.
>
> I prefer my mail to always be in bsd mbox files because that's still 
> what 90% of the world expects your mail to be in, can be manipulated by 
> any code that operates on text files and doesn't break when I move from 
> OS to OS.  And speed shouldn't be a factor when your mua does proper 
> indexing.

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Bastien]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> I've looked at Gnus.  It uses the "paradigm" of newsgroups for
> everything.  I'd rather not have to retrain my brain for something as
> trivial as reading email, but let's just say I'm willing.  Is there a
> way to see "I do not have an NNTP server, so please don't bother me
> about it anymore"?  It looks like I can set a variable so that gnus will
> ignore the email side of things, but I can't find something similar for
> news.

;; Don't use nntp at all
(setq gnus-select-method '(nnnil))

;; Use nnml to read email
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnml "")))

;; Fetch emails from the mail pool
(setq mail-sources '((file :path "/var/mail/guerry"))

> I've also taken a glance at VM and would like to go further, but I see
> no direct evidence that it works with Emacs 22.x.  Is anyone using VM
> with a recent Emacs on Windows XP?

Make sure you also have a look at Mew: http://www.mew.org

> Before anyone seriously suggests moving to linux as a solution to my
> problem (which seems dangerously near), let me just clarify something.
> I'm well aware of my options in that regard and am very familiar with
> all things *nixen.  Switching from Windows XP to *nix for email is not
> going to happen.  Not at all.  And I'm not interested in explaining why
> I won't or listening to why I should.

(That sounds a bit angry, no?)

> Installing, configuring and maintaining an IMAP server in order to read
> and search my mail is also not going to happen.  An ancient version of
> Eudora on my dad's old Mac LC could let me read my mail, *and* find my
> messages, without having to run such a thing.  And it did it for
> thousands of messages without flinching.  If a piece of software here in
> the modern world can't handle it, the answer is to not use that
> software.

(That sounds a bit angry too, no?)

> I prefer my mail to always be in bsd mbox files because that's still
> what 90% of the world expects your mail to be in, can be manipulated by
> any code that operates on text files and doesn't break when I move from
> OS to OS.  And speed shouldn't be a factor when your mua does proper
> indexing.

You sound a bit fussy about all those things.  

While your arguments might be very right to you, you'll certainly get
more helpful answers with a more open-minded attitude.

-- 
 Bastien

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough]

Bastien wrote:
>
>
> ;; Don't use nntp at all
> (setq gnus-select-method '(nnnil))
>
> ;; Use nnml to read email
> (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnml "")))
>
> ;; Fetch emails from the mail pool
> (setq mail-sources '((file :path "/var/mail/guerry"))
>   
This seems very promising!  I'll hit it later this afternoon and see how 
things turn out.
>   
>> I've also taken a glance at VM and would like to go further, but I see
>> no direct evidence that it works with Emacs 22.x.  Is anyone using VM
>> with a recent Emacs on Windows XP?
>>     
>
> Make sure you also have a look at Mew: http://www.mew.org
>   
I've got a tab open to this now.  Thanks again!
>   
>> Before anyone seriously suggests moving to linux as a solution to my
>> problem (which seems dangerously near), let me just clarify something.
>> I'm well aware of my options in that regard and am very familiar with
>> all things *nixen.  Switching from Windows XP to *nix for email is not
>> going to happen.  Not at all.  And I'm not interested in explaining why
>> I won't or listening to why I should.
>>     
>
> (That sounds a bit angry, no?)
>   
This happens a lot.  Like, every time I have any issue whatsoever with a 
piece of open source software.  You'd think the problem wouldn't be 
present during those many years I ran linux for my primary desktop 
machine, but then it just becomes "You're using the wrong distro."

>   
>> I prefer my mail to always be in bsd mbox files because that's still
>> what 90% of the world expects your mail to be in, can be manipulated by
>> any code that operates on text files and doesn't break when I move from
>> OS to OS.  And speed shouldn't be a factor when your mua does proper
>> indexing.
>>     
>
> You sound a bit fussy about all those things.  
>   
Only in-so-far as I have requirements.  Other people have requirements 
to.  Some people require that every piece of software they run be GPL'd.

In specific regard to mbox files, I've prioritized interoperability and 
the ability to treat my mail as text.  It's useful when I want to hack 
out some code that, say, gets all the YouTube URLs from the mail folder 
"Videos", passes them to another script that will download the files and 
I don't want to have to change that code when the mua changes.
> While your arguments might be very right to you, you'll certainly get
> more helpful answers with a more open-minded attitude.
>
>   
I'm very open-minded, especially when it comes to potential solutions to 
a problem I'm faced with.  But I've also been fairly clear that I'm 
working with Windows and mbox files.  Solutions that suggest I no longer 
do this aren't really solutions at all.  It's like having my car run out 
of gas on the highway, then having someone come along and tell me to get 
a hybrid.

I think I'll get more helpful answers when I'm clear about what I need.

Thanks again for the info above!

Jeff

-- 

Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Andreas Politz]

Torsten Mueller <dev-null@shared-files.de> writes:

> Andreas Politz <politza@fh-trier.de> wrote:
>
>> > > Yes, especially if it can use the w3m text browser + emacs-w3m
>> > > to render the messages. w3m would need to be installed
>> > > separately, but I don't know if it works on Windows.
>> >
>> > It does, very well.
>>
>> Is there are binary to be found somewhere ?
>
> http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/pc/gnuwin32/cygwin/mirrors/cygnus/release/w3m/w3m-0.5.1-2.tar.bz2
>
> This binary is compiled for cygwin but the package is standalone. This
> means it contains all the required dlls. You will not have to install
> a complete cygwin environment. Just unpack and run w3m.exe.
>

Thanks, I did not realize that it could be part of cygwin.

-ap

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough]

Richard Riley wrote:
> Never heard of anything like that before. Emacs doesn't launch
> thunderbird.
>   

I didn't think it would either, but it's doing it even if Thunderbird 
isn't running.  My suspicion is that, in the interest of not confusing 
Windows users, Emacs is now shipping messages to the default mailer 
listed in the OS, in preference to its own SMTP capabilities.  If I'm 
right, I'm hoping there's a variable I can set to fix this.  If I'm 
wrong, then I've got no idea.  Clearly Emacs isn't doing the talk to the 
SMTP server directly thing right now, and I'd rather not dig through 
smtpmail.el to find out why.

Jeff

-- 

Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough]

Jeff Clough wrote:
> Sending Mail
>
> In the process of all this looking, I decided to try to get *sending* 
> mail to work.  I hear tell from this faq 
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/Network-access.html) that 
> emacs can "talk directly to SMTP mail servers" via smtpmail.el.  I 
> stuffed the following in my .emacs:
>
> (setq user-full-name "Your full name")
> (setq user-mail-address "Your@email.address")
> (setq smtpmail-default-smtp-server "domain.name.of.your.smtp.server")
>     (setq send-mail-command 'smtpmail-send-it) ; For mail-mode (Rmail)
>
>
> Did C-x m, wrote stuff, did C-c C-c and promptly got a Thunderbird 
> window popping up the message (well, actually it told me to paste the 
> message in because the text had been conveniently dropped on my 
> clipboard, thankfully obliterating what was there before).  Is there a 
> way to stop this from happening and for Emacs to just send it itself?  
> "Talk directly to SMTP mail servers" doesn't mean "Fire up another 
> application" in my opinion.
>
Alright, one thing solved:

The last line of lisp above should be setting send-mail-function, not 
send-mail-command.  Changing that, fixed it so I can send mail via Emacs 
without Thunderbird getting involved.  I stumbled across a message 
(here:  
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.gnus/browse_thread/thread/a42ca24f5d540d35) 
that clued me in.  Apparently if you don't set this variable now, Emacs 
does in fact toss the buffer at your default mailer.

Given the faq I mentioned in my original post appears to have it wrong, 
how do I go about filing a doc bug?

Jeff

-- 

Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Bastien]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

>> While your arguments might be very right to you, you'll certainly get
>> more helpful answers with a more open-minded attitude.
>>
>>   
> I'm very open-minded, especially when it comes to potential solutions to
> a problem I'm faced with.  But I've also been fairly clear that I'm
> working with Windows and mbox files.  Solutions that suggest I no longer
> do this aren't really solutions at all.  It's like having my car run out
> of gas on the highway, then having someone come along and tell me to get
> a hybrid.
>
> I think I'll get more helpful answers when I'm clear about what I need.

Fair enough, this I perfectly understand.  But I'm not a native english
speaker, so I might have misinterpreted your tone.

-- 
 Bastien

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[ken]

On 09/09/2009 05:59 AM Sébastien Vauban wrote:
> ken,
> 
> ken wrote:
>> On 09/09/2009 03:18 AM Sébastien Vauban wrote:
>>> notbob wrote:
>>>> On 2009-09-09, Bastien <bastienguerry@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> ...
>> But gnus has been problemmatic for me. I have multiple email accounts which
>> I access using imaps (running on different servers). Setting these all up
>> and managing them is a snap with Thunderbird. On the other hand, I've spend
>> *days* trying to get gnus to do the same and never did get them anything
>> close to working. So I gave up. There's too many other things in my life to
>> do.
> 
> It's true that setting up everything takes some time. But, once it's done, you
> can go wherever (to client sites) with your config file and get the same level
> of functionality as you had on your first PC.

That's a nice thing about text config files: you can copy them to other
machines, save previous versions for easy testing of new functionality,
adding another account simply by copying a block of text and changing a
few words.  Granted.  That's what I like about Linux too.


> 
> I am using Gnus for accessing the company IMAP server and different newsgroups
> (from our provider and from Gname).

I did all that years ago.  As I said, the difficulty I had was setting
up *multiple email accounts* (like eight or nine of them), all of which
use IMAPS (secure IMAP) and most of which use different IMAP servers and
different SMTP servers (using TLS + something else).  Tbird does all
this easily, plus:  some mail accounts have PGP keys, all different from
one another of course.  Incoming mail with and encryption key is
automatically signature-checked or decrypted, as applicable.  Add to
this folders and filters, color-coding of inbox mails (either
automatically by ruleset or manually with a couple mouse-clicks), mail
templates, multiple address books, searches (of course), and a lot more.

Under the category of "a lot more" are the add-ins, little apps (written
by computer Joes, Tbird outsiders who write code) that you can plug into
Tbird for added functionality.  E.g., one I use occasionally
transliterates English characters into Cyrillic (Russian alphabet).

Hey, I didn't start out this email trying to be an ad for Thunderbird.
I just started talking and all this stuff came out.  I almost went on a
tangent wherein there was pseudo-code.  But the more I thought about
that pseudo-code, the more I just kept thinking: TB's got this and this
and this and this and this.  And it's pretty simple to set up and use.
(With more than a half dozen accounts, you know I have to read and write
a lot of email, so I can't use software that's going to slow me down.)

Here's an idea (take it or leave it... just a suggestion): somebody
should write a plug-in for Tbird so that when I write or reply to an
email, instead of going into Tbird's editor, emacs springs up in the
composition space.  That way I get all (or a lot) of emacs' features:
the key combos I'm so accustomed to, easy searching/replacing, abbrevs,
paging up and down without need of the mouse, etc.  That would be THE
Killer Tbird plug-in.


> 
> 
>> If there's ever clear and accurate enough documentation on doing this, I
>> might attempt it again.

Then again, perhaps not.  I'm liking Tbird pretty good.


> 
> My goal is to get my .gnus file published on the Web, for helping people (the
> same way I got helped by looking at other's config files).
> 
> Though, I need to get my private stuff removed from this file. Not yet done.
> Could be in a couple of weeks from now.

That's great.  It might not tip me back, but I'm sure a lot of other
folks would love to have at it.


> 
> 
>> (But then, how does gnus handle html-formatted emails with images (e.g.,
>> photos)...?  PDFs?)
> 
> Not a prob'.

I actually meant "how?"... like what does emacs do with them.  What do I
have to do to read a PDF-- or Word doc (shudder)-- which comes attached
to an email?  E.g., in Tbird I double-click on the text name of the
attachment (or together-selected attachments).


> 
> Inlined photos are just seeable directly in the buffers.

And then if I want to forward that email containing photos...?  In Tbird
I'd do C-l (a composition window pops with the photos in it and the
cursor blinking in the To: field), type in the addressee(s) (Tbird does
type-ahead... guesses the name or address or nickname of the
addressee(s), displaying them in a drop down if I want to scroll or read
through them and select one or more of them), then do C-Return to send.
 You can see, TB's doing a lot more work than I am when I send an email.
 It's like it knows what I need to do next.  Well, a lot of the time it
does.  And most of the time I can let the mouse be lonely... just use
the keyboard.


> 
> The same for HTML (with emacs-w3m and the w3m browser available from Cygwin).
> For HTML with Java inside, just K H to fire up Firefox with the mail
> contents...

:(


> 
> PDF are normal links. Just clicking on them opens up SumatraPDF under Windows
> or okular under Linux.

That's cool.

> 
> All of that in one config file, usable under both Windows and Linux, without
> any change. Just conditional setup.

Sounds like it gets a solid B.  But Tbird gets an A-.


> 
> Seb
> 

Thanks for the info.  Emacs is definitely doing better things with email
than just a few years ago.

Best,
ken

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley]

ken <gebser@mousecar.com> writes:

> On 09/09/2009 05:59 AM Sébastien Vauban wrote:
>> ken,
>> 
>> ken wrote:
>>> On 09/09/2009 03:18 AM Sébastien Vauban wrote:
>>>> notbob wrote:
>>>>> On 2009-09-09, Bastien <bastienguerry@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> ...
>>> But gnus has been problemmatic for me. I have multiple email accounts which
>>> I access using imaps (running on different servers). Setting these all up
>>> and managing them is a snap with Thunderbird. On the other hand, I've spend
>>> *days* trying to get gnus to do the same and never did get them anything
>>> close to working. So I gave up. There's too many other things in my life to
>>> do.
>> 
>> It's true that setting up everything takes some time. But, once it's done, you
>> can go wherever (to client sites) with your config file and get the same level
>> of functionality as you had on your first PC.
>
> That's a nice thing about text config files: you can copy them to other
> machines, save previous versions for easy testing of new functionality,
> adding another account simply by copying a block of text and changing a
> few words.  Granted.  That's what I like about Linux too.
>
>
>> 
>> I am using Gnus for accessing the company IMAP server and different newsgroups
>> (from our provider and from Gname).
>
> I did all that years ago.  As I said, the difficulty I had was setting

Year ago eh? Wow ...

> up *multiple email accounts* (like eight or nine of them), all of
> which

That many <shakes head in amazement> .. :-)

> use IMAPS (secure IMAP) and most of which use different IMAP servers and
> different SMTP servers (using TLS + something else).  Tbird does all
> this easily, plus:  some mail accounts have PGP keys, all different
> from

So does Gnus. 

> one another of course.  Incoming mail with and encryption key is

See posting-styles. .authinfo. epa.

> automatically signature-checked or decrypted, as applicable.  Add to
> this folders and filters, color-coding of inbox mails (either
> automatically by ruleset or manually with a couple mouse-clicks), mail
> templates, multiple address books, searches (of course), and a lot
> more.

Yeah, if you need all that then maybe gnus is not for you since it is
tricky at times to configure.

I got some nice colour coding going though :

http://richardriley.net/projects/images/gnus_scr.png

Probably not as good as Thunderbird for sure ...

>
> Under the category of "a lot more" are the add-ins, little apps (written
> by computer Joes, Tbird outsiders who write code) that you can plug into
> Tbird for added functionality.  E.g., one I use occasionally
> transliterates English characters into Cyrillic (Russian alphabet).
>
> Hey, I didn't start out this email trying to be an ad for Thunderbird.

It certainly reads that way.

> I just started talking and all this stuff came out.  I almost went on a
> tangent wherein there was pseudo-code.  But the more I thought about
> that pseudo-code, the more I just kept thinking: TB's got this and this
> and this and this and this.  And it's pretty simple to set up and use.
> (With more than a half dozen accounts, you know I have to read and write
> a lot of email, so I can't use software that's going to slow me down.)
>
> Here's an idea (take it or leave it... just a suggestion): somebody


> should write a plug-in for Tbird so that when I write or reply to an
> email, instead of going into Tbird's editor, emacs springs up in the
> composition space.  That way I get all (or a lot) of emacs' features:

I already use emacs from web forms and mailto links using mozex and
"It's all text". But thunderbird I dont know about. I would be surprised
if there was not something already. But I guess most TB users don't
really use Emacs : it's kind of a clash of cultures :-; The excellent
emacs daemon now means things like mailto from firefox are instant ..

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MailtoHandler#toc4

> the key combos I'm so accustomed to, easy searching/replacing, abbrevs,
> paging up and down without need of the mouse, etc.  That would be THE
> Killer Tbird plug-in.
>> 
>>> If there's ever clear and accurate enough documentation on doing this, I
>>> might attempt it again.
>
> Then again, perhaps not.  I'm liking Tbird pretty good.
>
>
>> 
>> My goal is to get my .gnus file published on the Web, for helping people (the
>> same way I got helped by looking at other's config files).
>> 
>> Though, I need to get my private stuff removed from this file. Not yet done.
>> Could be in a couple of weeks from now.
>
> That's great.  It might not tip me back, but I'm sure a lot of other
> folks would love to have at it.

There are quite a few out there. Mine's currently a bit of a mess but
viewable here:

http://richardriley.net/projects/emacs/

>
>
>> 
>> 
>>> (But then, how does gnus handle html-formatted emails with images (e.g.,
>>> photos)...?  PDFs?)
>> 
>> Not a prob'.
>
> I actually meant "how?"... like what does emacs do with them.  What do I
> have to do to read a PDF-- or Word doc (shudder)-- which comes attached
> to an email?  E.g., in Tbird I double-click on the text name of the
> attachment (or together-selected attachments).

Read the manual. You can view images inline, or you can open the links
in an external viewer. There are countless possibilities.

>
>
>> 
>> Inlined photos are just seeable directly in the buffers.
>
> And then if I want to forward that email containing photos...?  In
> Tbird

Forward the email? Whats so special about that?

> I'd do C-l (a composition window pops with the photos in it and the
> cursor blinking in the To: field), type in the addressee(s) (Tbird does
> type-ahead... guesses the name or address or nickname of the
> addressee(s), displaying them in a drop down if I want to scroll or read
> through them and select one or more of them), then do C-Return to send.
>  You can see, TB's doing a lot more work than I am when I send an
> email.
>  It's like it knows what I need to do next.  Well, a lot of the time it
> does.  And most of the time I can let the mouse be lonely... just use
> the keyboard.

I'm not sure what you're enthusing over here. To forward an email
(containing attachments or not) is trivial and a standard gnus
function.
>
>
>> 
>> The same for HTML (with emacs-w3m and the w3m browser available from Cygwin).
>> For HTML with Java inside, just K H to fire up Firefox with the mail
>> contents...
>
> :(

I'm not sure I understand why the grimace. I read most of my html emails
as "washed" html - ie the text only. HTML email is the invention of
Lucifer anyway.

>
>
>> 
>> PDF are normal links. Just clicking on them opens up SumatraPDF under Windows
>> or okular under Linux.
>
> That's cool.

And very much depending on how your emacs & gnus are setup.
>
>> 
>> All of that in one config file, usable under both Windows and Linux, without
>> any change. Just conditional setup.
>
> Sounds like it gets a solid B.  But Tbird gets an A-.
>
>
>> 
>> Seb
>> 
>
> Thanks for the info.  Emacs is definitely doing better things with email
> than just a few years ago.

Like what? Most of this has been in gnus for ever and day.

>
> Best,
> ken
>
>

Do try gnus. If you like emacs then you can't go wrong : it's great
having email integrated with the rest of my eamcs life : live
translations from german, spelling, org-mode links, one key google
search, w3m browsing or optionally launching an external browser,
fancy-splitting, bbdb .. i could go on.

Gnus is not for the feint of heart : but I think you'd like it if you're
willing to forget how thunderbird does it and open your mind to the Gnus
"style".

ps

I think you might have got your Thunderbird posting styles mixed
up. Weren't you John earlier? If not you sound very similar.

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jason Rumney]

On Sep 9, 9:48 pm, Jeff Clough <j...@chaosphere.com> wrote:

> Gnus
>
> I've looked at Gnus.  It uses the "paradigm" of newsgroups for
> everything.  I'd rather not have to retrain my brain for something as
> trivial as reading email, but let's just say I'm willing.  Is there a
> way to see "I do not have an NNTP server, so please don't bother me
> about it anymore"?

Customize gnus-select-method to be what you want for your primary use
of Gnus.

> Sending Mail

> (setq send-mail-command 'smtpmail-send-it) ; For mail-mode (Rmail)

Try send-mail-function

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jason Rumney]

On Sep 9, 11:48 pm, Jeff Clough <j...@chaosphere.com> wrote:

> My suspicion is that, in the interest of not confusing
> Windows users, Emacs is now shipping messages to the default mailer
> listed in the OS, in preference to its own SMTP capabilities.

Yes, your suspicion is correct. Unlike *nix boxes, Windows machines
are not typically configured with a standard sendmail-like mail
sending mechanism, the best we can expect is that their default GUI
Mail application is correctly configured.  But this is only the
default, so that Bug Reporting works out of the box.

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Dave Täht]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> Okay, so I'm seriously considering switching from Thunderbird to Emacs
> (under Windows XP) for my mail and calendar needs, but I haven't used
> Emacs for either of these purposes in so long I don't know if it's
> feasible, nor am I certain which modes are "best".  I'm hoping that
> some of you can point me in the right direction.  I'd "just do it" as
> a test, but I'd rather not go through a crap ton of hassle and
> problems only to hear later "You should not have used foo mode for
> that, bar mode is what you want".

I just switched from Thunderbird to GNUS. It's taken me a month to get
truly happy with it (about 29 days longer than I wanted to spend) and I
still have some things left to do, but overall I'm glad I made the
effort.

To this end I made some compromises and changes to my assumptions in
order to work with how gnus actually worked. Also, my solution is very
linux specific, and not relevant, really to what you were asking about,
but I gotta write this up somewhere....

After fighting with postfix + dovecot, sieve, imap, gnus, and Maildir
formats for several days, I gave up, and switched to postfix, procmail
and mbox format, abandoning even the thought of imap.

I did several unusual things, few of which were GNUS specific, (although
gnus made me do it because I could not get maildir working) but perhaps
folks would find these alternatives interesting. I evaluated mh, gnus,
and mews and settled on gnus as being the closest in mindset for what I
wanted "(set bugs off (do what I am thinking))"

1) I adopted IPv6 for my email requirements, coupled with ca-cert
certificates for authentication. This gives me a static IP address and
real AAAA record in DNS so I can actually receive mail on my laptop's
tunnel, wherever I am, via my stably connected secondary mx host, and I
can send/receive mail directly to anyone running IPv6 on their mailhost
(I've only seen bsd.org and isc.org have that turned on), or via that
secondary mx exchanger.

The certs get rid of sasl which I always thought was a hassle anyway.

2) Instead of IMAP I am just opening emacs frames on other X displays,
against my already running emacs session. My server is my laptop, not
some far off imap server. It's cool to keep all my context - especially
including org-mode - available anywhere I walk in the house or around
town.

3) For backups, rsync run out of cron. I'm not entirely convinced this
is acceptable so I bcc another account on another mail server on sent mail. 

4) For RSS, r2e, which uses rss2email to correctly *text* format most
RSS feeds. I tried the in-gnus RSS reader, found that it interrupted my
workflow too much, and dropped it in favor of r2e.

5) For news, Leafnode. The local nntp cache makes a huge difference in
speed, and I can read news offline. I liked leafnode so much that I
subscribed to lkml again via gmane, and the various gnus.* groups. 

6) To get text boxes from the web into emacs and back, mozdev.

7) For calendar, org-mode. I'm not going to talk about how much more I
love org mode the more time I spend in emacs. I could go on for pages
about org-mode, but the javascript org-annotation-helper would be a good
thing to start raving about if I did. I always found things like
evolution and exchange very lightweight for complex task
management. Thunderbird did it not at all.

8) chat - I dropped pidgin and adopted erc + bitlbee. Bitlbee now does
skype, too.

9) Pastebin on a keystroke from any buffer. Love it.

As you can tell, I *really* wanted to be able to receive mail directly
to my laptop again, and handle being offline, just like in the good ole
days. A lot of the above flowed from that. Writing web pages to parse
the output of "batch" and multiple clustered commands struck me as more
work than getting certs and ipv6 tunnels and email to work.

The net benefit to my life is that I just rid myself of several
applications and their relevant context switches. I would argue that I
went from about 10-15% emacs usage per day to about 75%. I'm able to do
things like customize my keyboard to handle my carpalness (like mapping
' to return) and not have my default keystrokes break other apps.

With Emacs' abbrev mode, im turns automatically into I'm, and with 
auto-capitalize mode (which I put a fix in for on the wiki recently) I
almost never have to hit a shift key again. Big win. You couldn't get me
to switch back to any other mail client if you paid me.

I love green on black text everywhere. 

I cleared out a lot of screen space by getting rid of menus, icons,
scrollbars, fringes and other stuff that get in the way. hide-mode-line
is cool, too.

Supercite is great. The gpg integration is great too.

rss2email has easily put 12 hours a week back into my life that I used
to spend waiting for blogs to load. I'm spending 4 hours of that on
netnews, which has been kind of fun in a retro sort of way.

My mail is as fast now as instant messaging. Switching in or out of mail
mode takes two keys, a split second, and no thought. There's no "Logging
into server... checking folders... sending mail..." step at all. For the
first couple weeks I kept running tail -f /var/log/mail.log just because
I was scared it wasn't working.

I tied mail and org mode notifications into a speech synth.

I can do just about any darn thing I want to with procmail, including
automagically create mailboxes for any mailing lists I might join. I
had wished thunderbird would do that for a long time.

And I can take my mail with me, to the beach, or the park, without having
to be online, and write voluminous emails like this one.

My only major open problem is somewhere in my maildir experiments my
sent mail folder stopped working. :(. I'll figure it out eventually.

I'm still in a losing fight with how GNUS splits windows on wide displays.

I still have the more prosaic problem of expiring the mailboxes (like
messages from cron and nagios) that I want to expire the way I want to
expire them. I like very much the concept of expiring - or at least,
automatically archiving, mail, much more than I like the idea of
continuing to have 20,000+ message mailboxes as I have in gmail. Yes, I
have read how to do it, but regular expressions scare me. I will try it
on some smaller test mailboxes first. So far, 2000+ message mbox
mailboxes have been acceptably fast on the hardware I use.

mbox format + archival actually makes sense to me, although I will take
a stab at Maildir again one of these days.

-- 
Dave Taht
http://the-edge.blogspot.com

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Francis Moreau]

On Sep 9, 4:55 am, Bastien <bastiengue...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Jeff Clough <j...@chaosphere.com> writes:
> > Okay, so I'm seriously considering switching from Thunderbird to Emacs
> > (under Windows XP) for my mail and calendar needs, but I haven't used
> > Emacs for either of these purposes in so long I don't know if it's
> > feasible, nor am I certain which modes are "best".  I'm hoping that some
> > of you can point me in the right direction.  I'd "just do it" as a test,
> > but I'd rather not go through a crap ton of hassle and problems only to
> > hear later "You should not have used foo mode for that, bar mode is what
> > you want".
>
> Check Gnus and Org.
>
> http://gnus.org/manual.htmlhttp://orgmode.org/
>
> > 1.  It needs to work on Windows XP without having to install a
> > unix/posix environment like Cygwin.  I *am* willing to install discrete
> > utilities if necessary (if Emacs doesn't do POP on its own and needs
> > some external program to do it, for instance).
>
> AFAIK Emacs + Gnus works fine under Windows.
>
> > 2.  I have just under seven thousand messages in various folders (mbox
> > files) that I'll be wanting to keep, so it needs to not choke and die
> > when confronted with "many" messages.
>
> It's okay.  
>

Well, what do you mean by 'okay' ?

Opening huge groups (> 1000 articles) is just slow with Gnus, really.
Fetching the headers, sorting and displaying the articles by using the
thread view. takes years. It's like Gnus is using some O(n2) algos.

Doing the same thing with thunderbird is incredibly faster.

Another important drawback, is that since gnus is written in elisp, it
doesn't have any multithread support in it. So if you're doing some
actions that take a while (and there are, news/mail server can  be
slow), the whole emacs process (where gnus is running) is just stuck.

Don't get me wrong, I use GNUS (maybe because I spent so much time in
it, I don't want to admit I was wrong ;) but you must be ready to
spent some time to configure it and to adopt it and I'm wondering if
it really worth the trouble specially if the OP is not interested in
news group...

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough]

From: Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:06:16 -0700 (PDT)

> On Sep 9, 4:55 am, Bastien <bastiengue...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
> Don't get me wrong, I use GNUS (maybe because I spent so much time in
> it, I don't want to admit I was wrong ;) but you must be ready to
> spent some time to configure it and to adopt it and I'm wondering if
> it really worth the trouble specially if the OP is not interested in
> news group...
> 

It wasn't worth it.  I use Mew for mail and it works just fine.  Well,
as good as Emacs works under Windows at all.

Jeff


----------
Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/ 

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> From: Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:06:16 -0700 (PDT)
>
>> On Sep 9, 4:55 am, Bastien <bastiengue...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Don't get me wrong, I use GNUS (maybe because I spent so much time in
>> it, I don't want to admit I was wrong ;) but you must be ready to
>> spent some time to configure it and to adopt it and I'm wondering if
>> it really worth the trouble specially if the OP is not interested in
>> news group...
>> 
>
> It wasn't worth it.  I use Mew for mail and it works just fine.  Well,
> as good as Emacs works under Windows at all.
>
> Jeff
>
> ----------
> Author of the Genesys System
> A "free" universal role-playing game.
> http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/ 
>


I think it is worth it because of the benefits of it being cradled by
mother Emacs : having all my normal text tools for translation,
spelling, searching etc in my gnus buffers is just too cool. It all
works together too well. I do remember being frustrated earlier because
of the incomprehensible manual and the raft of options (and being newish
to emacs). But it was worth it.

And there are tons of examples out there of working set ups where all
that needs to be changed is the select method and a different .authinfo.

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Francis Moreau]

On Oct 12, 2:56 pm, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jeff Clough <j...@chaosphere.com> writes:
> > From: Francis Moreau <francis.m...@gmail.com>
> > Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:06:16 -0700 (PDT)
>
> >> On Sep 9, 4:55 am, Bastien <bastiengue...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Don't get me wrong, I use GNUS (maybe because I spent so much time in
> >> it, I don't want to admit I was wrong ;) but you must be ready to
> >> spent some time to configure it and to adopt it and I'm wondering if
> >> it really worth the trouble specially if the OP is not interested in
> >> news group...
>
> > It wasn't worth it.  I use Mew for mail and it works just fine.  Well,
> > as good as Emacs works under Windows at all.
>
> I think it is worth it because of the benefits of it being cradled by
> mother Emacs : having all my normal text tools for translation,
> spelling, searching etc in my gnus buffers is just too cool. It all
> works together too well. I do remember being frustrated earlier because
> of the incomprehensible manual and the raft of options (and being newish
> to emacs). But it was worth it.

But you probably get the same benefits with Mew...

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley]

Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com> writes:

> On Oct 12, 2:56 pm, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Jeff Clough <j...@chaosphere.com> writes:
>> > From: Francis Moreau <francis.m...@gmail.com>
>> > Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:06:16 -0700 (PDT)
>>
>> >> On Sep 9, 4:55 am, Bastien <bastiengue...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >> Don't get me wrong, I use GNUS (maybe because I spent so much time in
>> >> it, I don't want to admit I was wrong ;) but you must be ready to
>> >> spent some time to configure it and to adopt it and I'm wondering if
>> >> it really worth the trouble specially if the OP is not interested in
>> >> news group...
>>
>> > It wasn't worth it.  I use Mew for mail and it works just fine.  Well,
>> > as good as Emacs works under Windows at all.
>>
>> I think it is worth it because of the benefits of it being cradled by
>> mother Emacs : having all my normal text tools for translation,
>> spelling, searching etc in my gnus buffers is just too cool. It all
>> works together too well. I do remember being frustrated earlier because
>> of the incomprehensible manual and the raft of options (and being newish
>> to emacs). But it was worth it.
>
> But you probably get the same benefits with Mew...

heh! I read "mutt". Mew is more of a cat than a mutt :-) 

-- 
googletalk/jabber : rileyrgdev@googlemail.com

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Andreas Politz]

Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com> writes:

> On Oct 12, 2:56 pm, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Jeff Clough <j...@chaosphere.com> writes:
>> > From: Francis Moreau <francis.m...@gmail.com>
>> > Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:06:16 -0700 (PDT)
>>
>> >> On Sep 9, 4:55 am, Bastien <bastiengue...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >> Don't get me wrong, I use GNUS (maybe because I spent so much time in
>> >> it, I don't want to admit I was wrong ;) but you must be ready to
>> >> spent some time to configure it and to adopt it and I'm wondering if
>> >> it really worth the trouble specially if the OP is not interested in
>> >> news group...
>>
>> > It wasn't worth it.  I use Mew for mail and it works just fine.  Well,
>> > as good as Emacs works under Windows at all.
>>
>> I think it is worth it because of the benefits of it being cradled by
>> mother Emacs : having all my normal text tools for translation,
>> spelling, searching etc in my gnus buffers is just too cool. It all
>> works together too well. I do remember being frustrated earlier because
>> of the incomprehensible manual and the raft of options (and being newish
>> to emacs). But it was worth it.
>
> But you probably get the same benefits with Mew...

So what is your experience with Mew concerning ease of setup, huge mail
boxes, message threading and general performance ?

-ap

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough]

From: Andreas Politz <politza@fh-trier.de>
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:12:36 +0200

> Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> On Oct 12, 2:56 pm, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I think it is worth it because of the benefits of it being cradled by
>>> mother Emacs : having all my normal text tools for translation,
>>> spelling, searching etc in my gnus buffers is just too cool. It all
>>> works together too well. I do remember being frustrated earlier because
>>> of the incomprehensible manual and the raft of options (and being newish
>>> to emacs). But it was worth it.
>>
>> But you probably get the same benefits with Mew...

Every Emacs feature I've wanted and tried to use works very well with
Mew, or at least no worse than to be expected under Windows.

> So what is your experience with Mew concerning ease of setup, huge mail
> boxes, message threading and general performance ?

Setting up Mew was several orders of magnitude easier than setting up
Gnus, which I was never able to successfully do.  A good part of this
is that the Mew folks know something about documentation.  Another
part of this is that they seem to have spent less time creating a
one-size-fits-all "messaging" solution and concentrated on making a
good MUA.  There's news stuff in Mew, from what I've read, but it
doesn't seem to have affected how *mail* is treated.

I'll skip down to message threading because that's the easy one: I
don't use message threading in email and never have in any MUA.

Mew handles huge mailboxes both incredibly well and hideously.  If you
use the default configuration, a mailbox is nothing more than a
directory on the disk with each message sitting in it's own text file
(this appears to be your standard ASCII affair with anything else
MIME'd up, but I don't receive messages in multi-byte formats so I
don't know for sure how those would be handled).

When you visit a folder, Mew creates a summary file in the appropriate
directory and displays a list of the messages in that folder to the
user.  If the summary file for the folder is current, visiting that
folder, even for the first time that Emacs session, takes no
observable time for a folder with about 1,000 messages in it.  I
assume the "right" answer here is that it takes as long as is required
for Mew to open the summary file and dump it to the screen.  The
summary file is text, with one line per message, although these lines
do need to be parsed to display the information to the user the way
the user has Mew configured.

Where Mew fails hard is in when it choses to generate those summary
files.  If you are merrily filing messages into a folder from your
Inbox or some other location, they don't ever show up in that summary
file until you visit that folder in Mew.  Then Mew sees the summary
data is out of date, throws it away and rebuilds the entire file
again.  Even for 1,000 messages this means that it will take a while.

Now granted, Mew's one saving grace here is that it isn't catatonic
while this happens.  You can still use Mew, Emacs as a whole *and* any
messages that have been summarized in that folder already.  The issue
is that you don't have access to all of the messages until the summary
file has been rebuilt.  And in the default configuration, with one
message per file, that's a *lot* of expensive disk I/O.

It's on my perpetual to-do list to fiddle around with idle timers and
see if I can't make Mew do this re-summarizing lazily in the
background so I can dodge this issue, but I'm not holding my breath
that I'll ever get around to it.

As for overall performance, I'm very happy with it.  It's leaps and
bounds faster than Thunderbird and I can work much more efficiently
having access to the rest of Emacs in the same environment.

It's certainly not a perfect piece of software, but that I could get
it to work *at all* is a pretty good feature and makes it immediately
better than Gnus for me.

Jeff



----------
Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/ 

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> From: Andreas Politz <politza@fh-trier.de>
> Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:12:36 +0200
>
>> Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com> writes:
>> 
>>> On Oct 12, 2:56 pm, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I think it is worth it because of the benefits of it being cradled by
>>>> mother Emacs : having all my normal text tools for translation,
>>>> spelling, searching etc in my gnus buffers is just too cool. It all
>>>> works together too well. I do remember being frustrated earlier because
>>>> of the incomprehensible manual and the raft of options (and being newish
>>>> to emacs). But it was worth it.
>>>
>>> But you probably get the same benefits with Mew...
>
> Every Emacs feature I've wanted and tried to use works very well with
> Mew, or at least no worse than to be expected under Windows.
>
>> So what is your experience with Mew concerning ease of setup, huge mail
>> boxes, message threading and general performance ?
>
> Setting up Mew was several orders of magnitude easier than setting up
> Gnus, which I was never able to successfully do.  A good part of this

What part were you unable to do? Did you have it reading mail at all?

> is that the Mew folks know something about documentation.  Another
> part of this is that they seem to have spent less time creating a
> one-size-fits-all "messaging" solution and concentrated on making a
> good MUA.  There's news stuff in Mew, from what I've read, but it
> doesn't seem to have affected how *mail* is treated.

It would be good to see something about how you expect mail handling to
work which is not supported by Gnus.

>
> I'll skip down to message threading because that's the easy one: I
> don't use message threading in email and never have in any MUA.

You don't have to in gnus either.

>
> Mew handles huge mailboxes both incredibly well and hideously.  If you

I have large mailboxes in Gnus. It handles them fine.

> use the default configuration, a mailbox is nothing more than a
> directory on the disk with each message sitting in it's own text file
> (this appears to be your standard ASCII affair with anything else
> MIME'd up, but I don't receive messages in multi-byte formats so I
> don't know for sure how those would be handled).

Well, that is nice but how do you relate it to Gnus which supports
multiple backends?

>
> When you visit a folder, Mew creates a summary file in the appropriate
> directory and displays a list of the messages in that folder to the
> user.  If the summary file for the folder is current, visiting that
> folder, even for the first time that Emacs session, takes no
> observable time for a folder with about 1,000 messages in it.  I
> assume the "right" answer here is that it takes as long as is required
> for Mew to open the summary file and dump it to the screen.  The
> summary file is text, with one line per message, although these lines
> do need to be parsed to display the information to the user the way
> the user has Mew configured.
>
> Where Mew fails hard is in when it choses to generate those summary
> files.  If you are merrily filing messages into a folder from your
> Inbox or some other location, they don't ever show up in that summary
> file until you visit that folder in Mew.  Then Mew sees the summary
> data is out of date, throws it away and rebuilds the entire file
> again.  Even for 1,000 messages this means that it will take a while.

Ah, so it does pause!

>
> Now granted, Mew's one saving grace here is that it isn't catatonic
> while this happens.  You can still use Mew, Emacs as a whole *and* any
> messages that have been summarized in that folder already.  The issue
> is that you don't have access to all of the messages until the summary
> file has been rebuilt.  And in the default configuration, with one
> message per file, that's a *lot* of expensive disk I/O.

Well, yes if you access all your messages. I have about 20 news groups
subscribed to and about 12 different email folders handling mail for 4
email addresses using fancy splitting. It really is pretty
instant. Admittedly I have my own dovecot server too which uses
getmail to fetch from imap servers on the net periodically.

>
> It's on my perpetual to-do list to fiddle around with idle timers and
> see if I can't make Mew do this re-summarizing lazily in the
> background so I can dodge this issue, but I'm not holding my breath
> that I'll ever get around to it.
>
> As for overall performance, I'm very happy with it.  It's leaps and
> bounds faster than Thunderbird and I can work much more efficiently
> having access to the rest of Emacs in the same environment.
>
> It's certainly not a perfect piece of software, but that I could get
> it to work *at all* is a pretty good feature and makes it immediately
> better than Gnus for me.
>
> Jeff

It's a shame you could not get Gnus to work. There must be something
subtle you missed. But since you could not get it to work, it's wrong to
suggest Mews handling is better in any way. I couldn't really see
anything in what you said that suggests, in any shape or form, that Mews
is a better emacs MUA than Gnus. But if Mews works for you thats great.

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough]

From: Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:58:39 +0200

>> Setting up Mew was several orders of magnitude easier than setting up
>> Gnus, which I was never able to successfully do.  A good part of this
> 
> What part were you unable to do? Did you have it reading mail at all?

I'm tempted to go into specifics, but I'll resist.  I see a lot of
your response is of the "Gnus is great" variety, so you've obviously
had some good experiences.  I didn't.  Maybe if the documentation was
better I'd be using Gnus today instead of Mew.

> It's a shame you could not get Gnus to work. There must be something
> subtle you missed. But since you could not get it to work, it's wrong to
> suggest Mews handling is better in any way. I couldn't really see
> anything in what you said that suggests, in any shape or form, that Mews
> is a better emacs MUA than Gnus. But if Mews works for you thats great.

It's not wrong to compare what I know about Gnus to what I know about
Mew.

Where the Gnus documentation exists, it's awful.  This is in direct
contrast of Mew, where I was able to look at one page of text, follow
a handful of steps and have a working MUA in less than an hour.

Gnus also brags about the fact that all messages are treated the same,
without regard to where they came from.  While this is *technically*
true, a more accurate statement is that it treats all messages like
news and all folders like newsgroups.  I just don't work that way.
Maybe, as with all "paradigm-ware", once you get used to how Gnus does
things it all makes sense and makes my productivity rocket skyward,
but it's more important to me that I'm reading my mail *today* in a
way that makes sense to me *now*.

These might not be points in the "Ways Mew is better than Gnus" column
for you, but they are for me.  Call me old-fashioned, but not getting
a piece of software to work at all after an hour of dicking with it,
nor seeing any real progress toward making it work, is more than
enough reason to call it crap.

And yes, it's entirely possible I missed something.  In fact, I'd call
it an absolute certainty given the documentation.

Jeff



----------
Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/ 

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> From: Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:58:39 +0200
>
>>> Setting up Mew was several orders of magnitude easier than setting up
>>> Gnus, which I was never able to successfully do.  A good part of this
>> 
>> What part were you unable to do? Did you have it reading mail at all?
>
> I'm tempted to go into specifics, but I'll resist.  I see a lot of

Why not? If you mention specifics that did not work maybe I or others
might help?

> your response is of the "Gnus is great" variety, so you've obviously

No. My response was of the form "well, you mention this in Mews and,
well, Gnus can do that too". There is a big difference between that and
"Mews sucks and Gnus rocks" :-)

> had some good experiences.  I didn't.  Maybe if the documentation was
> better I'd be using Gnus today instead of Mew.

I got most of my config from a mixture of howtos and the manual.

>
>> It's a shame you could not get Gnus to work. There must be something
>> subtle you missed. But since you could not get it to work, it's wrong to
>> suggest Mews handling is better in any way. I couldn't really see
>> anything in what you said that suggests, in any shape or form, that Mews
>> is a better emacs MUA than Gnus. But if Mews works for you thats great.
>
> It's not wrong to compare what I know about Gnus to what I know about
> Mew.

That is true Jeff. But you didn't do that. You said you never got Gnus
working. Which is a different thing. I think its hard to be objective
about a MUA if you didn't actually use it as one. Or am I mistaken in
your meaning?

>
> Where the Gnus documentation exists, it's awful.  This is in direct
> contrast of Mew, where I was able to look at one page of text, follow
> a handful of steps and have a working MUA in less than an hour.
>
> Gnus also brags about the fact that all messages are treated the same,

Brags?

> without regard to where they came from.  While this is *technically*

And also not true. Using splitting on the gnus client side or
subscribing to different maildirs via imap for example different
messages can go to different folders all with their own customised
handling/presentation/posting style.

> true, a more accurate statement is that it treats all messages like
> news and all folders like newsgroups.  I just don't work that way.

In what way? My email folders feel like email folders to me. New emails
appear, I read them and then archive them or delete them.

> Maybe, as with all "paradigm-ware", once you get used to how Gnus does
> things it all makes sense and makes my productivity rocket skyward,
> but it's more important to me that I'm reading my mail *today* in a
> way that makes sense to me *now*.

As I do.I think the issue would clearer if we new what it is you
couldn't get working. Nothing in emacs is "really out of the box simple"
IMO :-;

>
> These might not be points in the "Ways Mew is better than Gnus" column
> for you, but they are for me.  Call me old-fashioned, but not getting
> a piece of software to work at all after an hour of dicking with it,
> nor seeing any real progress toward making it work, is more than
> enough reason to call it crap.

It's certainly not "crap". But if you don't have the patience or the
desire to pursue it and you're happy with Mew, then enjoy - it's still
a great email client I am sure hosted by emacs.

In short my email set up talks to an impa server, drags all emails in,
splits them into different folders, I then use different smtp servers
for sending depending on the posting style employed by that particular
group. It all works very, very fast, efficiently and reliably with
excellent customisation facilities. No. It's not "crap".

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough]

I'm pretty sure you've decided this is a religious issue at this
point, so it's unlikely I'm going to pursue the conversation beyond
this message.  You like Gnus, I don't.  Fair enough.

From: Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:20:59 +0200

> Why not? If you mention specifics that did not work maybe I or others
> might help?

Help with what?  Getting software I'm no longer interested in to run?

> I got most of my config from a mixture of howtos and the manual.

I read that as at least three independent sources of documentation.  I
don't find that at all reasonable, but hey, I'm not the world.

>> It's not wrong to compare what I know about Gnus to what I know about
>> Mew.
> 
> That is true Jeff. But you didn't do that. You said you never got Gnus
> working. Which is a different thing. I think its hard to be objective
> about a MUA if you didn't actually use it as one. Or am I mistaken in
> your meaning?

My answer to this was (and is) below.

>>
>> Where the Gnus documentation exists, it's awful.  This is in direct
>> contrast of Mew, where I was able to look at one page of text, follow
>> a handful of steps and have a working MUA in less than an hour.
>>
>> Gnus also brags about the fact that all messages are treated the same,
> 
> Brags?

Yes.  From page one of the manual:

"Gnus is a message-reading laboratory. It will let you look at just
about anything as if it were a newsgroup. You can read mail with it,
you can browse directories with it, you can ftp with it|you can even
read news with it!"

> And also not true. Using splitting on the gnus client side or
> subscribing to different maildirs via imap for example different
> messages can go to different folders all with their own customised
> handling/presentation/posting style.

That you can customize it's behavior and make things do what you want
them to do is not an endorsement of the default behavior.  The
developers of Gnus, as expressed in their own documentation, say that
a strength of Gnus is treating all of the messages the same.

> It's certainly not "crap". But if you don't have the patience or the
> desire to pursue it and you're happy with Mew, then enjoy - it's still
> a great email client I am sure hosted by emacs.

How many hours of frustration should a user be expected to endure in
order to run a piece of software to solve the problem of reading
email?  Mind you, I'm not talking about hours spent learning how to
*use* the software, I'm talking about hours spent just getting it to
work *at all*.

> In short my email set up talks to an impa server, drags all emails in,
> splits them into different folders, I then use different smtp servers
> for sending depending on the posting style employed by that particular
> group. It all works very, very fast, efficiently and reliably with
> excellent customisation facilities. No. It's not "crap".

So Gnus isn't crap as a *client* because you can do everything you
want by running multiple *servers*!?!  I'm sorry, but in my world
"become a sysadmin for a handful of servers" is in no way a reasonable
solution to "i'd like to read my email now".

Jeff



----------
Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/ 

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[rustom]

Hi Richard

The gnus manual reads in at near 500 pages.
Do you think thats a reasonable size document for a mail reader?

Just curious

Rustom

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> I'm pretty sure you've decided this is a religious issue at this
> point, so it's unlikely I'm going to pursue the conversation beyond
> this message.  You like Gnus, I don't.  Fair enough.

Nothing in my reply suggested that. I merely asked you to be more
specific about what did not work. However it's clear that from this
reply you really have nothing to add other than being dismissive of Gnus
in general and insulting with regards to the manual.

>
> From: Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:20:59 +0200
>
>> Why not? If you mention specifics that did not work maybe I or others
>> might help?
>
> Help with what?  Getting software I'm no longer interested in to run?

Had you sought help back when maybe you would now be more qualified to
actually dismiss Gnus handling of email. Yet you freely admit to not
having successfully used it. I find this somewhat strange. If there is
any "religion" going on here it is most certainly not from me.

>
>> I got most of my config from a mixture of howtos and the manual.
>
> I read that as at least three independent sources of documentation.  I
> don't find that at all reasonable, but hey, I'm not the world.

Fortunately not. You have dragged this thread down quite rapidly for
some reason known only to yourself. It is clear you were frustrated by
your inability to get Gnus running. I was merely suggesting that help is
freely available. And to talk about the usage of Gnus when you freely
admit to not having used it or got it working is, well, ridiculous.

>
>>> It's not wrong to compare what I know about Gnus to what I know about
>>> Mew.
>> 
>> That is true Jeff. But you didn't do that. You said you never got Gnus
>> working. Which is a different thing. I think its hard to be objective
>> about a MUA if you didn't actually use it as one. Or am I mistaken in
>> your meaning?
>
> My answer to this was (and is) below.
>
>>>
>>> Where the Gnus documentation exists, it's awful.  This is in direct
>>> contrast of Mew, where I was able to look at one page of text, follow
>>> a handful of steps and have a working MUA in less than an hour.
>>>
>>> Gnus also brags about the fact that all messages are treated the same,
>> 
>> Brags?
>
> Yes.  From page one of the manual:
>
> "Gnus is a message-reading laboratory. It will let you look at just
> about anything as if it were a newsgroup. You can read mail with it,
> you can browse directories with it, you can ftp with it|you can even
> read news with it!"

Brags?

>
>> And also not true. Using splitting on the gnus client side or
>> subscribing to different maildirs via imap for example different
>> messages can go to different folders all with their own customised
>> handling/presentation/posting style.
>
> That you can customize it's behavior and make things do what you want
> them to do is not an endorsement of the default behavior.  The
> developers of Gnus, as expressed in their own documentation, say that
> a strength of Gnus is treating all of the messages the same.

But you maintain you never got it working. Yet you feel qualified to call
it "crap"?

>
>> It's certainly not "crap". But if you don't have the patience or the
>> desire to pursue it and you're happy with Mew, then enjoy - it's still
>> a great email client I am sure hosted by emacs.
>
> How many hours of frustration should a user be expected to endure in
> order to run a piece of software to solve the problem of reading
> email?  Mind you, I'm not talking about hours spent learning how to
> *use* the software, I'm talking about hours spent just getting it to
> work *at all*.

What were your problems? Be specific. Maybe it could lead to an
improvement in the manual?

>
>> In short my email set up talks to an impa server, drags all emails in,
>> splits them into different folders, I then use different smtp servers
>> for sending depending on the posting style employed by that particular
>> group. It all works very, very fast, efficiently and reliably with
>> excellent customisation facilities. No. It's not "crap".
>
> So Gnus isn't crap as a *client* because you can do everything you
> want by running multiple *servers*!?!  I'm sorry, but in my world

No. What on earth made you think that? I merely pointed out its a
feature I use.

> "become a sysadmin for a handful of servers" is in no way a reasonable
> solution to "i'd like to read my email now".

Possibly you didn't understand my setup explanation and this adds to
your frustration and readiness to dismiss Gnus. Why are you taking about
becoming a sysadmin for a handful of servers?!?

You seem pretty unwilling to actually explain your issues with Gnus
other than you think its "crap" because you were unable to get it
working. I find that rather strange and unhelpful when there are plenty
of others who would gladly help. Still. Whatever floats your boat. I got
it working and I was pretty new to emacs at the time. Gnus is a
wonderful MUA for those willing to follow the instructions. For those
who just want to read their email 3 seconds after deciding on an emacs
based MUA and don't have the desire to actively seek help, I
don't doubt Mews is better for you.

I mistook your original post as possibly looking for a fact based
comparison between features of Mews and Gnus. Nothing you said about the
handling of mail by Mews is in any way unique to it or missing from the
more powerful Gnus as far as I can see.

>
> Jeff
>
> ----------
> Author of the Genesys System
> A "free" universal role-playing game.
> http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/ 
>

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley]

rustom <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Richard
>
> The gnus manual reads in at near 500 pages.
> Do you think thats a reasonable size document for a mail reader?
>
> Just curious
>
> Rustom

I think the gnus manual is far from perfect. I am not aware of anyone
that thinks it is. I certainly have never claimed that. It's why most
people use google to get a "quick setup" solution. When its running THEN
the manual is useful because Gnus IS a powerful bit of SW and its far
more than just a "mail reader".

But just for the record : I have not said Gnus is easy to set up. I have
not said the manual is perfect. I have, however, said that vaunting the
features of one MUA over Gnus when one has not even got Gnus working is
somewhat naive and biased. With the power comes the complications I
guess :-;

I can only state that having got Gnus working the way I want its far and
away more powerful than any other solution I have used in all the years
I have used a mail/nntp client.

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Memnon Anon]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> You like Gnus, I don't.  Fair enough.

This sums it up nicely ;)

>> In short my email set up talks to an impa server, drags all emails in,
>> splits them into different folders, I then use different smtp servers
>> for sending depending on the posting style employed by that particular
>> group. It all works very, very fast, efficiently and reliably with
>> excellent customisation facilities. No. It's not "crap".
>
> So Gnus isn't crap as a *client* because you can do everything you
> want by running multiple *servers*!?!  I'm sorry, but in my world
> "become a sysadmin for a handful of servers" is in no way a reasonable
> solution to "i'd like to read my email now".

However, you got something wrong here. posting styles is the same as
"identities" in MS outlook, i.e. different names, different
mailaddresses, different smtp-server (gmail, hotmail, gmx etc.). So, no
one has to be sysadmin for a handful of servers ;).

I agree to several points you made:
a) Documentation is, well, not optimal.
   I got my config finally using quite a bit of time and bits and pieces
   from different homepages, emacswiki, etc.
b) The mail=news=rssfeed etc. approach might not be optimal for
   everyone.
c) If mew works great for you, just stay with it ;).

I personally love gnus. Now that it works ;). If I lost my config, I am
not sure I would go through the hazzle to refactor it again. 
But it is *not* necessary to "become a sysadmin for a handful of
servers" ;).

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Matt Lundin]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> I'm pretty sure you've decided this is a religious issue at this
> point, so it's unlikely I'm going to pursue the conversation beyond
> this message.  You like Gnus, I don't.  Fair enough.

All I will say in response is that Richard's posts have been a model of
politeness and restraint.

>>> It's not wrong to compare what I know about Gnus to what I know
>>> about Mew.
>> 
>> That is true Jeff. But you didn't do that. You said you never got
>> Gnus working. Which is a different thing. I think its hard to be
>> objective about a MUA if you didn't actually use it as one. Or am I
>> mistaken in your meaning?
>
> My answer to this was (and is) below.
>
>>>
>>> Where the Gnus documentation exists, it's awful.  This is in direct
>>> contrast of Mew, where I was able to look at one page of text, follow
>>> a handful of steps and have a working MUA in less than an hour.

I believe that all Richard was saying is that this is a subjective
judgment. As a point of comparison, when I tried setting up an emacs
email client a year ago, I spent a couple of days trying to get Mew to
work, whereas I had Gnus accessing my IMAP folders in just a few
minutes.

But I would by no means conclude from this experience that Mew is not a
superb email client. It would be much safer to attribute the problems to
my own misunderstanding and/or shortcomings.

> How many hours of frustration should a user be expected to endure in
> order to run a piece of software to solve the problem of reading
> email?  Mind you, I'm not talking about hours spent learning how to
> *use* the software, I'm talking about hours spent just getting it to
> work *at all*.

I'm sorry to hear that was your experience. It was not mine. But instead
of simply dismissing Gnus, it would be helpful if you offered specifics.
What in particular was difficult? Getting the mail? Reading the mail?

>> In short my email set up talks to an impa server, drags all emails
>> in, splits them into different folders, I then use different smtp
>> servers for sending depending on the posting style employed by that
>> particular group. It all works very, very fast, efficiently and
>> reliably with excellent customisation facilities. No. It's not
>> "crap".
>
> So Gnus isn't crap as a *client* because you can do everything you
> want by running multiple *servers*!?! I'm sorry, but in my world
> "become a sysadmin for a handful of servers" is in no way a reasonable
> solution to "i'd like to read my email now".

I don't think Richard was talking about running his own servers here
(though you can do that if you want, of course). Rather, he's simply
saying that Gnus can relay mail via different smtp servers depending on
what group one is in.

- Matt

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:33:28 +0000 Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> wrote: 

JC> Where the Gnus documentation exists, it's awful.  This is in direct
JC> contrast of Mew, where I was able to look at one page of text, follow
JC> a handful of steps and have a working MUA in less than an hour.

Perhaps I'm weird (OK, s/Perhaps//), but I recall using the Gnus docs
when I first tried Gnus and successfully configuring everything.  This
was before I was comfortable with Emacs Lisp at all.  These days I work
on Gnus so I'm not impartial :)

I've wanted to use the Gnus assistants (available in theory for years
now) to make the initial setup easier.  I simply haven't had time.  This
would be a fun project for someone interested in making Gnus users less
frustrated.

Ted

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Francis Moreau]

On 13 oct, 15:58, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jeff Clough <j...@chaosphere.com> writes:
> > From: Andreas Politz <poli...@fh-trier.de>
> > Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:12:36 +0200
>
> >> Francis Moreau <francis.m...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> >>> On Oct 12, 2:56 pm, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> I think it is worth it because of the benefits of it being cradled by
> >>>> mother Emacs : having all my normal text tools for translation,
> >>>> spelling, searching etc in my gnus buffers is just too cool. It all
> >>>> works together too well. I do remember being frustrated earlier because
> >>>> of the incomprehensible manual and the raft of options (and being newish
> >>>> to emacs). But it was worth it.
>
> >>> But you probably get the same benefits with Mew...
>
> > Every Emacs feature I've wanted and tried to use works very well with
> > Mew, or at least no worse than to be expected under Windows.
>
> >> So what is your experience with Mew concerning ease of setup, huge mail
> >> boxes, message threading and general performance ?
>
> > Setting up Mew was several orders of magnitude easier than setting up
> > Gnus, which I was never able to successfully do.  A good part of this
>
> What part were you unable to do? Did you have it reading mail at all?
>

BTW, one thing is really annoying with gnus is that it screw all my
current window configuration (window layout) when I start composing a
new article/mail.

I did (setq gnus-use-full-window nil) but gnus always use a full
window when writing a new mail.

Do you  have/know any setup which could fix this behaviour ?

thanks

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley]

Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com> writes:

> On 13 oct, 15:58, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Jeff Clough <j...@chaosphere.com> writes:
>> > From: Andreas Politz <poli...@fh-trier.de>
>> > Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:12:36 +0200
>>
>> >> Francis Moreau <francis.m...@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> >>> On Oct 12, 2:56 pm, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>>> I think it is worth it because of the benefits of it being cradled by
>> >>>> mother Emacs : having all my normal text tools for translation,
>> >>>> spelling, searching etc in my gnus buffers is just too cool. It all
>> >>>> works together too well. I do remember being frustrated earlier because
>> >>>> of the incomprehensible manual and the raft of options (and being newish
>> >>>> to emacs). But it was worth it.
>>
>> >>> But you probably get the same benefits with Mew...
>>
>> > Every Emacs feature I've wanted and tried to use works very well with
>> > Mew, or at least no worse than to be expected under Windows.
>>
>> >> So what is your experience with Mew concerning ease of setup, huge mail
>> >> boxes, message threading and general performance ?
>>
>> > Setting up Mew was several orders of magnitude easier than setting up
>> > Gnus, which I was never able to successfully do.  A good part of this
>>
>> What part were you unable to do? Did you have it reading mail at all?
>>
>
> BTW, one thing is really annoying with gnus is that it screw all my
> current window configuration (window layout) when I start composing a
> new article/mail.
>
> I did (setq gnus-use-full-window nil) but gnus always use a full
> window when writing a new mail.
>
> Do you  have/know any setup which could fix this behaviour ?
>
> thanks

I do my gnus stuff on a separate "elscreen" so, no, I can't really help
with that.

,----
| (require 'elscreen) ;; C-z n for new screen or next etc.
| (require 'elscreen-gf) ;; C-z n for new screen or next etc.
| 
| (defmacro elscreen-create-automatically (ad-do-it)
|   `(if (not (elscreen-one-screen-p))
|        ,ad-do-it
|      (elscreen-create)
|      (elscreen-notify-screen-modification 'force-immediately)
|      (elscreen-message "New screen is automatically created")))
| 
| (defadvice elscreen-jump (before elscreen-jump-create activate)
|   (let ((next-screen (string-to-number (string last-command-event))))
|     (when (and (<= 0 next-screen)
| 	       (<= next-screen 9)
| 	       (not (elscreen-screen-live-p next-screen)))
|       (elscreen-set-window-configuration
|        (elscreen-get-current-screen)
|        (elscreen-current-window-configuration))
|       (elscreen-set-window-configuration
|        next-screen (elscreen-default-window-configuration))
|       (elscreen-append-screen-to-history next-screen)
|       (elscreen-notify-screen-modification 'force))))
| 
| (defadvice elscreen-next (around elscreen-create-automatically activate)
|   (elscreen-create-automatically ad-do-it))
| 
| (defadvice elscreen-previous (around elscreen-create-automatically activate)
|   (elscreen-create-automatically ad-do-it))
| 
| (defadvice elscreen-toggle (around elscreen-create-automatically activate)
|   (elscreen-create-automatically ad-do-it))
| 
| (provide 'rgr-elscreen)
`----

You might also consider winner-mode I think it is.

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Francis Moreau]

On 16 oct, 16:26, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I do my gnus stuff on a separate "elscreen" so, no, I can't really help
> with that.

I use windows.el but I'm sometimes hit by this and find it really
annoying.

I'm wondering if the buffer used for composing article could replace
the article buffer only. So if I have the following layout when
reading an article:

+----------------+
| summary buffer |
+----------------+
|                |
| article buffer |
|                |
+----------------+

when replying to an article the layout becomes:

+----------------+
| summary buffer |
+----------------+
|                |
| compose buffer |
|                |
+----------------+

Thanks

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Dave Täht]

dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs) writes:

> A top-post: Here, someone went from Thunderbird (gui, etc)
> to emacs, showing what he had to do to succeed.
> (I include it all this once, so if expired for you, is
> newified again.)
>
> Question: I use mutt on my isp-shell-account, and like it,
> and use .1% of its capability (I think, so powerful is it).
> Has anyone switched from mutt to emacs (temporarily or not)?
> Comments?
>

This particular thread diverged later back into discussing GNUs again,
so I thought I would provide an update to what I wrote below as I've
changed a few things around and am still working through some problems.

After running for two months I got a boatload of very large
multi-megabyte attachments from several people, and also accumulated a
lot of mail in my mbox folder (>120MB). Gnus got slow. 

I sat down and finally figured out most of how to get maildir working,
and switched to that. (Later on I figured out how to get emacs maildir
co-exist with imap maildir, but I have not switched to that yet.)

That, after 2 months is getting slow, but I have not (yet)
implemented expiry the way that I want it to work, and I have high hopes
that once that works things will be better. Also I plan to throw
hardware at the problem (an intel flash drive) in the fairly near
future. 

Also, I am trying to learn enough about emacs to profile gnus. Perhaps
it can be made more co-operatively multitasking - or some of the
threaded emacs work going on elsewhere will prove fruitful.

The slowest thing in my setup right now is not mail but news, as I
turned on nocem support. That takes a very long time to filter the
news in emacs. I finally bit the bullet and installed a real news server
(inn), which turned out to not be the huge hassle that I remember it to
be. With that, nocem support can happen as the feed arrives, not as it
is read, and I gain local newsgroups again.

Where I'm eventually going with this is developing a 300mw (milliwatt!)
mail and news server, several blog posts on that can be found at:

http://the-edge.blogspot.com/search/label/pocobelle

(As is usual with blogs, it helps to read them in reverse order)

Attachments are a real problem. I'll argue that they ended up occupying
over 90% of my slowest mailboxes and it is completely unnecessary to
keep them in email format once read. I hope to get around to writing
some sort of sane procmail filter that will strip out the attachment on
incoming and save it somewhere sane (saving me a decision step, anyway)
and insert an url to where it ended up.

As I wrote below, the advantages of running out of Emacs itself (typing
with less pain!) for me outweigh the problems with speed and
interactivity. 

I did, while converting to maildir, try mutt. I liked it, but leaving my
abbrevs and shortcuts for it simply wasn't in the cards.

I have no opinion on the other mail readers for emacs.
 
Some more comments below.

>>I just switched from Thunderbird to GNUS. It's taken me a month to get
>>truly happy with it (about 29 days longer than I wanted to spend) and I
>>still have some things left to do, but overall I'm glad I made the
>>effort.
>>
>>To this end I made some compromises and changes to my assumptions in
>>order to work with how gnus actually worked. Also, my solution is very
>>linux specific, and not relevant, really to what you were asking about,
>>but I gotta write this up somewhere....
>>
>>After fighting with postfix + dovecot, sieve, imap, gnus, and Maildir
>>formats for several days, I gave up, and switched to postfix, procmail
>>and mbox format, abandoning even the thought of imap.
>>
>>I did several unusual things, few of which were GNUS specific, (although
>>gnus made me do it because I could not get maildir working) but perhaps
>>folks would find these alternatives interesting. I evaluated mh, gnus,
>>and mews and settled on gnus as being the closest in mindset for what I
>>wanted "(set bugs off (do what I am thinking))"
>>
>>1) I adopted IPv6 for my email requirements, coupled with ca-cert
>>certificates for authentication. This gives me a static IP address and
>>real AAAA record in DNS so I can actually receive mail on my laptop's
>>tunnel, wherever I am, via my stably connected secondary mx host, and I
>>can send/receive mail directly to anyone running IPv6 on their mailhost
>>(I've only seen bsd.org and isc.org have that turned on), or via that
>>secondary mx exchanger.
>>
>>The certs get rid of sasl which I always thought was a hassle anyway.

The ipv6 mail exchanger thing is working great, and several of the lists
I read (notably debian) connect directly to me now, without going
through intermediaries. I also got my backup mx server to run on a tiny
power sipping arm box, which is pretty cool (see the pocobelle blog
posts linked above)

>>
>>2) Instead of IMAP I am just opening emacs frames on other X displays,
>>against my already running emacs session. My server is my laptop, not
>>some far off imap server. It's cool to keep all my context - especially
>>including org-mode - available anywhere I walk in the house or around
>>town.

This, too, remains great.

>>
>>3) For backups, rsync run out of cron. I'm not entirely convinced this
>>is acceptable so I bcc another account on another mail server on sent mail. 

Still not satisified with this.

>>
>>4) For RSS, r2e, which uses rss2email to correctly *text* format most
>>RSS feeds. I tried the in-gnus RSS reader, found that it interrupted my
>>workflow too much, and dropped it in favor of r2e.

I discovered that once I reduced most blogs I used to read to RSS that
netnews became much more interesting in comparison.

>>
>>5) For news, Leafnode. The local nntp cache makes a huge difference in
>>speed, and I can read news offline. I liked leafnode so much that I
>>subscribed to lkml again via gmane, and the various gnus.* groups. 

I still am using leafnode. I played around a bit with leafnode2 before
deciding to try to setup inn. I have not switched to inn yet.

>>8) chat - I dropped pidgin and adopted erc + bitlbee. Bitlbee now does
>>skype, too.

And otr. Love bitlbee. Problem right now is that it doesn't do
yahoo. (Patches are out there, haven't got around to applying them)

>>The net benefit to my life is that I just rid myself of several
>>applications and their relevant context switches. I would argue that I
>>went from about 10-15% emacs usage per day to about 75%. I'm able to do
>>things like customize my keyboard to handle my carpalness (like mapping
>>' to return) and not have my default keystrokes break other apps.
>>
>>With Emacs' abbrev mode, im turns automatically into I'm, and with 
>>auto-capitalize mode (which I put a fix in for on the wiki recently) I
>>almost never have to hit a shift key again. Big win. You couldn't get me
>>to switch back to any other mail client if you paid me.
>>
>>I love green on black text everywhere. 
>>
>>I cleared out a lot of screen space by getting rid of menus, icons,
>>scrollbars, fringes and other stuff that get in the way. hide-mode-line
>>is cool, too.
>>
>>Supercite is great. The gpg integration is great too.
>>
>>rss2email has easily put 12 hours a week back into my life that I used
>>to spend waiting for blogs to load. I'm spending 4 hours of that on
>>netnews, which has been kind of fun in a retro sort of way.
>>
>>My mail is as fast now as instant messaging. Switching in or out of mail
>>mode takes two keys, a split second, and no thought. There's no "Logging
>>into server... checking folders... sending mail..." step at all. For the
>>first couple weeks I kept running tail -f /var/log/mail.log just because
>>I was scared it wasn't working.
>>
>>I tied mail and org mode notifications into a speech synth.
>>
>>I can do just about any darn thing I want to with procmail, including
>>automagically create mailboxes for any mailing lists I might join. I
>>had wished thunderbird would do that for a long time.
>>
>>And I can take my mail with me, to the beach, or the park, without having
>>to be online, and write voluminous emails like this one.
>>
>>My only major open problem is somewhere in my maildir experiments my
>>sent mail folder stopped working. :(. I'll figure it out eventually.
>>
>>I'm still in a losing fight with how GNUS splits windows on wide displays.
>>
>>I still have the more prosaic problem of expiring the mailboxes (like
>>messages from cron and nagios) that I want to expire the way I want to
>>expire them. I like very much the concept of expiring - or at least,
>>automatically archiving, mail, much more than I like the idea of
>>continuing to have 20,000+ message mailboxes as I have in gmail. Yes, I
>>have read how to do it, but regular expressions scare me. I will try it
>>on some smaller test mailboxes first. So far, 2000+ message mbox
>>mailboxes have been acceptably fast on the hardware I use.
>>
>>mbox format + archival actually makes sense to me, although I will take
>>a stab at Maildir again one of these days.

I got maildir working finally (I don't remember how). Getting it to
co-exist with dovecot's imap was harder, but I have that running now for
a test user.

(I will document later). Now, as to whether I need imap or not, I don't
know... I really like wandering the house with X on multiple emacs displays.


-- 
Dave Taht http://the-edge.blogspot.com

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Francis Moreau]

d@teklibre.org (Dave Täht) writes:

[...]

>
> 5) For news, Leafnode. The local nntp cache makes a huge difference in
> speed, and I can read news offline. I liked leafnode so much that I
> subscribed to lkml again via gmane, and the various gnus.* groups. 
>

Does that mean you store all LKML traffic on you machine ?

I actually use news groups to avoid this so it sounds a bit weird.

Thanks
-- 
Francis