From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Jeff Clough Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:29:28 +0000 Message-ID: <20091013.132928.135602782.jeff@chaosphere.com> References: <37578bed-d355-4adf-aae1-319c9f002ecf@j19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com> <8763ak8rjv.fsf@fh-trier.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1255440632 10908 80.91.229.12 (13 Oct 2009 13:30:32 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:30:32 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue Oct 13 15:30:17 2009 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1MxhS9-0003oN-IV for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:30:13 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:37129 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1MxhS8-0007Ac-Jk for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:30:12 -0400 Original-Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1MxhRi-00079Y-FR for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:29:46 -0400 Original-Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1MxhRd-000782-KH for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:29:46 -0400 Original-Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=32894 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1MxhRd-00077z-Ez for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:29:41 -0400 Original-Received: from hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com ([71.74.56.125]:45809) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1MxhRd-0000kL-2p for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:29:41 -0400 Original-Received: from localhost ([66.65.230.106]) by hrndva-omta02.mail.rr.com with ESMTP id <20091013132939251.MZQC27930@hrndva-omta02.mail.rr.com> for ; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:29:39 +0000 In-Reply-To: <8763ak8rjv.fsf@fh-trier.de> X-Mailer: Mew version 6.2 on Emacs 22.3 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS 091012-0, 10/12/2009), Outbound message X-Antivirus-Status: Clean X-detected-operating-system: by monty-python.gnu.org: Solaris 10 (1203?) X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:68909 Archived-At: From: Andreas Politz Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:12:36 +0200 > Francis Moreau writes: > = >> On Oct 12, 2:56=A0pm, Richard Riley 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 bec= ause >>> of the incomprehensible manual and the raft of options (and being n= ewish >>> 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 ma= il > 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/ =