Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com>]

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/