Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net>]

1) Emacs mail clients

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

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

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

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

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

2) Everything in one file

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

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

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

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