Re: Emacs for mail: VM - WL - GNUS

[Uday Reddy <uDOTsDOTreddy@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

On 2/23/2011 9:20 AM, James Freer wrote:

> Many thanks for the suggestion. I have to say that i don't find emacs
> particularly user friendly... i get the impression that it's intended
> to be like that - even after one's gone and bought the book. I did
> look into offlineimap but again i haven't found it easy to follow.

Oh, sorry, I didn't realize that you were an Emacs newbie.  Then the 
first thing to do would be to get comfortable with using Emacs.  You 
need to give it some time, perhaps a month, reading the manual and 
trying things out.  You will definitely need to put in more effort than 
for the "user friendly" tools you allude to.  But, hopefully, in the 
end, you would have mastered a tool that can make you much more 
productive in your daily tasks.

VM was designed for people that already use Emacs.  That said, we do 
seem to have some users that have picked up VM without being habitual 
Emacs users.  They probably came in during the 80's and 90's when there 
weren't any easier tools like Thunderbird.  And, they probably also got 
a lot of help from the gnu.emacs.vm.info newsgroup to get things set up.

If you are still trying to decide between VM-WL-GNUS, then my opinion is 
that VM fits somewhere in the middle between WL and GNUS.  Its advantage 
is that it inter-operates with Thunderbird, as Alan mentioned already. 
So, you can switch back and forth between VM and Thunderbird.  It is 
also possibly more "powerful" than WL while being easier than GNUS.

Cheers,
Uday