Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com>]

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/