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 15:33:28 +0000 Message-ID: <20091013.153328.195057627.jeff@chaosphere.com> References: <8763ak8rjv.fsf@fh-trier.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1255448137 5755 80.91.229.12 (13 Oct 2009 15:35:37 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:35:37 +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 17:35:27 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 1MxjPJ-0001u9-Ex for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:35:25 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:34872 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1MxjPJ-0004Aa-8q for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:35:25 -0400 Original-Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1MxjNi-0003Q1-4S for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:33:46 -0400 Original-Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1MxjNd-0003LV-CF for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:33:45 -0400 Original-Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=54456 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1MxjNc-0003L3-Vp for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:33:41 -0400 Original-Received: from hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com ([71.74.56.125]:41350) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1MxjNc-0005RP-B4 for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:33:40 -0400 Original-Received: from localhost ([66.65.230.106]) by hrndva-omta04.mail.rr.com with ESMTP id <20091013153339345.PNTI8725@hrndva-omta04.mail.rr.com> for ; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:33:39 +0000 X-Mailer: Mew version 6.2 on Emacs 22.3 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) In-Reply-To: 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:68914 Archived-At: From: Richard Riley 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/