Re: Is anybody using "NotMuch" as an email client?, Re: Is anybody using "NotMuch" as an email client?

[James Thomas <jimjoe@gmx.net>]

Dr Rainer Woitok wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> currently I'm using "Rmail" for processing my email.   It works,  but it
> also is rather spartan sometimes.  Somewhere someone mentioned "NotMuch"
> but from searching the Internet, I'm not yet sure it is what I want.

You probably want Gnus. But it'll take some work:

> Currently I'm using the traditional approach of storing related mails in
> "mbox" type mail files.   Rather infrequently I have the need of search-
> ing all mails in an mbox for a string or regular expression.

You should be able to do that in Gnus; I haven't tried it myself, but it
has an mbox backend. For new ones indexing (gnus-search-notmuch is one
option) will be much faster.

> Apart from reading and writing mails I need to reply, to forward and
> occasionally to resend mails.

This works pretty much the same way in Gnus and the other options.

> As for downloading attachments, it's mostly enough to download them
> one by one but sometimes I want to download them all in a single
> sweep.

This is possible in Gnus using nnimap-fetch-partial-articles: it must be
possible to combine it with (info "(gnus) Agent Categories") for
specific kinds of emails, in advance. Manual download on viewing is
possible anyway, and see gnus-mime-replace-part for updating. For
storing mails offline you can enable the 'agent': If you think you'll
download some of the attachments only at a later viewing and want to
update the version stored offline (and of course, if this is an
important factor) you should add gnus-agent-unfetch-articles and
gnus-agent-fetch-selected-article to the appropriate hooks (and there's
also gnus-agent-eagerly-store-articles to play with).

It's a little hard, but from my experience, if you do it right you may
never need to switch email clients again.

Regards,
James