Re: Thunderbird to Emacs migration

[Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>]

On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:17:47 -0800, David Rogoff <david@therogoffs.com> wrote:
>On 2010-03-12 15:15:26 -0800, Giorgos Keramidas said:
>> Gnus is the mail reader I use.  I am still learning how to use it
>> effectively after almost two years, but it is a very nice program
>> with literally hundreds of options.  I've even written some Lisp code
>> to extend it and tweak its behavior in an automated manner.
>>
>> Gnus should be able to pull your messages from multiple IMAP and POP3
>> accounts, but see below before you pull everything into Gnus.
>
> vm is much easier to use for mail than gnus.  gnus is great as a
> (text) Usenet newsreader, but it just wasn't designed as a mail
> program and the attempts to make it so have all seemed pretty crazy to
> me.  I gave it a try for a while but it just required the user to do
> things the way gnus wanted and not what made sense as a mail program.
> I liked using vm and gnus together.  Any Usenet articles I wanted to
> save I could have gnus save into the folders I used for vm and read
> them later in vm.

I started using Gnus for Usenet too.  Then my Usenet time got way
smaller than the time I spent inside mutt.  So I experimented with Gnus
for email too.  Now I'm hooked up on features like:

  * Offline mode -- the ability to read messages and post while being
    disconnected from the network.

  * Excellent MIME and charset support -- the ability to read almost any
    charset some random mailer can throw at Emacs, using the standard
    and familiar recoding facilities of Emacs and a general "do the
    right thing" automation in Gnus

  * GnuPG and keyring support -- the signing and encryption keys of Gnus
    are now literally hardcoded in my spinal cord; I no longer have to
    'think' about how to encrypt or sign selected parts of a message or
    a full message including dozens of attachments

I still have to struggle a bit with the archiving methods of Gnus from
time to time, but I like its good parts so much that I keep saying to
myself I will try VM one day and then I keep happily using Gnus, without
actually giving VM a few months of usage to see if I like it.

So VM is probably a good Emacs-based mailer, but I don't know enough
about it to either recommend it to someone else or to be able to phrase
a useful opinion about it.