How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[nljlistbox2]

I've been reading about getting email set up in Emacs for the past several months, but I haven't yet come upon a satisfactory solution for me. I have a few questions that I hope someone might answer.

1. Gnus: It has often been observed that mail and news are similar creatures, so that it makes sense to handle mail in a system built for handling news. Certainly there are similarities. However, when I've read a news article in Gnus, it disappears. That suits me well enough. But I don't want the mail in my inbox to disappear once it's been read. I'd like to be able to see both my read and unread mail in my inbox and have the two distinguished in some way. Doable? I'm guessing it is, but the second issue has precluded me looking up how to do it.

2. Gnus again: As far as I've been able to ascertain (and of course I might be mistaken), Gnus does not support IMAP. To be sure it will download mail from an IMAP server (I have that set up already), but that is not my use case. I have my inboxes (the contents of which are retrieved from the outside world by fetchmail) and about twenty-years worth of filed mail in a local Dovecot IMAP server. I don't want my mail client (whatever I end up using) to make its own local copy of my mail -- I want it to allow me to read the mail in my IMAP inboxes, delete it on the rare occasions that I want to do that, or file it in other folders on the IMAP server. Did I miss something, or am I correct in thinking Gnus lacks the ability to interact with an IMAP server in that way?

3. RMAIL: Again, can it interact with IMAP as above? The impression that I've reached is that RMAIL is adamant about having it's own local copy of things.

4. Mutt with Emacs as external editor: This is the solution I'm leaning towards, but I'll be sad if I can't get an all-Emacs solution working. (After all, I do almost everything else on my computer in Emacs.) Are there known pitfalls to using Mutt with Emacs?

Thank you to anyone with suggestions.

N. Jackson.

Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[Tassilo Horn]

nljlistbox2@gmail.com writes:

Hi!

> 1. Gnus: It has often been observed that mail and news are similar
> creatures, so that it makes sense to handle mail in a system built for
> handling news. Certainly there are similarities. However, when I've
> read a news article in Gnus, it disappears. That suits me well
> enough. But I don't want the mail in my inbox to disappear once it's
> been read. I'd like to be able to see both my read and unread mail in
> my inbox and have the two distinguished in some way. Doable? I'm
> guessing it is, but the second issue has precluded me looking up how
> to do it.

,----[ C-h v gnus-fetch-old-headers RET ]
| gnus-fetch-old-headers is a variable defined in `gnus-sum.el'.
| Its value is some
| Original value was nil
| 
| Documentation:
| *Non-nil means that Gnus will try to build threads by grabbing old headers.
| If an unread article in the group refers to an older, already
| read (or just marked as read) article, the old article will not
| normally be displayed in the Summary buffer.  If this variable is
| t, Gnus will attempt to grab the headers to the old articles, and
| thereby build complete threads.  If it has the value `some', all
| old headers will be fetched but only enough headers to connect
| otherwise loose threads will be displayed.  This variable can
| also be a number.  In that case, no more than that number of old
| headers will be fetched.  If it has the value `invisible', all
| old headers will be fetched, but none will be displayed.
| 
| The server has to support NOV for any of this to work.
| 
| This feature can seriously impact performance it ignores all
| locally cached header entries.  Setting it to t for groups for a
| server that doesn't expire articles (such as news.gmane.org),
| leads to very slow summary generation.
`----

You can also enter the summary buffer using `C-u <number> RET' instead
of just `RET'.  That will show you the latest <number> of articles in
the group, no matter if new or read.

> 2. Gnus again: As far as I've been able to ascertain (and of course I
> might be mistaken), Gnus does not support IMAP.

Of course Gnus does IMAP.

,----[ (info "(gnus)Using IMAP") ]
| The most popular mail backend is probably ‘nnimap’, which provides
| access to IMAP servers.  IMAP servers store mail remotely, so the client
| doesn’t store anything locally.  This means that it’s a convenient
| choice when you’re reading your mail from different locations, or with
| different user agents.
`----

> To be sure it will download mail from an IMAP server (I have that set
> up already), but that is not my use case.

Seems you are using `mail-sources' instead of nnimap.

> I want it to allow me to read the mail in my IMAP inboxes, delete it
> on the rare occasions that I want to do that, or file it in other
> folders on the IMAP server. Did I miss something, or am I correct in
> thinking Gnus lacks the ability to interact with an IMAP server in
> that way?

Yes, you are wrong.  Check its manual (info "(gnus)Using IMAP").

Bye,
Tassilo

Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[Loris Bennett]

Hi N,

nljlistbox2@gmail.com writes:

> I've been reading about getting email set up in Emacs for the past
> several months, but I haven't yet come upon a satisfactory solution
> for me. I have a few questions that I hope someone might answer.
>
> 1. Gnus: It has often been observed that mail and news are similar
> creatures, so that it makes sense to handle mail in a system built for
> handling news. Certainly there are similarities. However, when I've
> read a news article in Gnus, it disappears. That suits me well
> enough. But I don't want the mail in my inbox to disappear once it's
> been read. I'd like to be able to see both my read and unread mail in
> my inbox and have the two distinguished in some way. Doable? I'm
> guessing it is, but the second issue has precluded me looking up how
> to do it.

This is a common question:

http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_398.html#SEC451

However, you will probably end up doing this less often than you might
think.

> 2. Gnus again: As far as I've been able to ascertain (and of course I
> might be mistaken), Gnus does not support IMAP. To be sure it will
> download mail from an IMAP server (I have that set up already), but
> that is not my use case. I have my inboxes (the contents of which are
> retrieved from the outside world by fetchmail) and about twenty-years
> worth of filed mail in a local Dovecot IMAP server. I don't want my
> mail client (whatever I end up using) to make its own local copy of my
> mail -- I want it to allow me to read the mail in my IMAP inboxes,
> delete it on the rare occasions that I want to do that, or file it in
> other folders on the IMAP server. Did I miss something, or am I
> correct in thinking Gnus lacks the ability to interact with an IMAP
> server in that way?

Gnus does work with IMAP.  Look here:

http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_208.html

> 3. RMAIL: Again, can it interact with IMAP as above? The impression
> that I've reached is that RMAIL is adamant about having it's own local
> copy of things.

I haven't used RMAIL for years, but look here:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Remote-Mailboxes.html#Remote-Mailboxes

> 4. Mutt with Emacs as external editor: This is the solution I'm
> leaning towards, but I'll be sad if I can't get an all-Emacs solution
> working. (After all, I do almost everything else on my computer in
> Emacs.) Are there known pitfalls to using Mutt with Emacs?

This is probably possible.  However, it strikes me as a little bizarre
since there are solutions within Emacs

> Thank you to anyone with suggestions.
>
> N. Jackson.

Cheers,

Loris

-- 
This signature is currently under construction.

Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[N. Jackson]

"Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de> writes:
> Hi N,

Hi Loris, thank you for your response.

> http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_398.html#SEC451

I had missed that there is a FAQ buried in the appendices of the Gnus
Info manual! It contains some quite useful tips that led me directly or
indirectly to most of the solutions to my puzzle. :)

> Gnus does work with IMAP.  Look here:
>
> http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_208.html

Yes. I had spent quite a bit of time in this part of the manual
previously. I had the IMAP part set up "correctly". What I was missing
(until the last couple of days) was the other parts of the puzzle:
Viewing my inbox and other mail folders / filing read mail / navigating
to filed mail folders.

I now have methods for those mostly sorted out.

The only real inconvenience remaining is that when I configure variables
for Gnus the values are global, and I don't see yet how to restrict
their scope to a particular server or group or retrieval method.

> I haven't used RMAIL for years, but look here:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Remote-Mailboxes.html#Remote-Mailboxes

It doesn't seem that RMAIL does what I want at all, and now that I have
things almost working in Gnus, I guess I won't be investigating this
avenue further at this point.

>> 4. Mutt with Emacs as external editor
>
> This is probably possible.  However, it strikes me as a little bizarre
> since there are solutions within Emacs

Indeed. It doesn't look like I will need to resort to this. Gnus it
is. :)

> Cheers,
>
> Loris

Thanks Loris.

N.

Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[James Freer]

On 1/26/14, N. Jackson <nljlistbox2@gmail.com> wrote:
> "Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de> writes:
>> Hi N,
>
> Hi Loris, thank you for your response.
>
>> http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_398.html#SEC451
>
> I had missed that there is a FAQ buried in the appendices of the Gnus
> Info manual! It contains some quite useful tips that led me directly or
> indirectly to most of the solutions to my puzzle. :)
>
>> Gnus does work with IMAP.  Look here:
>>
>> http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_208.html
>
> Yes. I had spent quite a bit of time in this part of the manual
> previously. I had the IMAP part set up "correctly". What I was missing
> (until the last couple of days) was the other parts of the puzzle:
> Viewing my inbox and other mail folders / filing read mail / navigating
> to filed mail folders.
>
> I now have methods for those mostly sorted out.
>
> The only real inconvenience remaining is that when I configure variables
> for Gnus the values are global, and I don't see yet how to restrict
> their scope to a particular server or group or retrieval method.
>
>> I haven't used RMAIL for years, but look here:
>>
>> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Remote-Mailboxes.html#Remote-Mailboxes
>
> It doesn't seem that RMAIL does what I want at all, and now that I have
> things almost working in Gnus, I guess I won't be investigating this
> avenue further at this point.
>
>>> 4. Mutt with Emacs as external editor
>>
>> This is probably possible.  However, it strikes me as a little bizarre
>> since there are solutions within Emacs
>
> Indeed. It doesn't look like I will need to resort to this. Gnus it
> is. :)
>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Loris

Well done because I found Gnus difficult to set up... and gave up.
Rather too involved for me although I did set up Mutt but didn't find
it to my liking. I used Alpine which reads the server well and works
fine with emacs... for me and my more limited abilites.

james

Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[N. Jackson]

Following up, for completeness, on my own post:

> The only real inconvenience remaining is that when I configure
> variables for Gnus the values are global, and I don't see yet how to
> restrict their scope to a particular server or group or retrieval
> method.

I have now found the solution to this as well. :)

Not that it was hidden; it was lying about in plain sight, I just failed
to recognise it at first. It is "Group Parameters", of course. ("Of
course" now that I know what it's called.)  One uses it to override
global Gnus settings (including display settings) for a specific Group
or Groups (specified by name using a regular expression).

For more information, from within Gnus: C-c TAB i Group Parameters RET.

So I now have the following in my .gnus.el and it does exactly what I
want:

(setq gnus-parameters
    ; Settings for all IMAP groups (could be more discerning, but this
    ; works just fine for now):
    '(("nnimap*"
        (gnus-large-newsgroup 6000) ; Suppress prompts for now.
        (display . all) ; Show previously-read mail too.
        (gnus-show-threads nil) ; Don't organise by threads.
        ; Sort chronologically with newest at top:
        (gnus-article-sort-functions '((not gnus-article-sort-by-date)))
      )
     )
)

(The (gnus-large-newsgroup 6000) is only in there temporarily, to prevent
Gnus from deciding that it better ask me how many headers to download,
there being rather a lot. Normally the Gnus global default threshold of
200 would be more than ample -- I rarely keep more that 50 mails in my
inbox at one time, but, because I haven't had an easily usable mail set
up for a few months, my main inbox is rather full of stuff that needs
filing and I was getting annoyed by the prompts every time I opened it!)

There are also Topic Parameters, but I didn't get in to those yet!

Gnus "suite" (was: Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server))

[Emanuel Berg]

James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> writes:

> Well done because I found Gnus difficult to set
> up... and gave up.  Rather too involved for me
> although I did set up Mutt but didn't find it to my
> liking. I used Alpine which reads the server well and
> works fine with emacs... for me and my more limited
> abilites.

Gnus is not difficult to setup. You just need like half
a page of skeleton code and put in a couple (5-6?) of
parameters that will tell what server to use for news,
what protocol and server to use to send mails, etc. -
just a couple of such things, that you always setup
anyway (no matter the client), and you get it from your
ISP.

There was a man on this list, Jambunathan K, who was in
contact with another man, who setup such fool-proof
configurations to get you started (called "suites"). I
don't know what happened to that project, or if they
got to Gnus, but no matter, Gnus is possible to setup
regardless of anyone's abilities.

-- 
underground experts united:
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[N. Jackson]

James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> writes:

> Well done because I found Gnus difficult to set up... and gave up.

As far as using it is a mail client I gave up too (temporarily) the
first time around. But after using it as a newsreader essentially as it
came out of the box for several months, and gradually tweaking it to my
liking, when I revisited using it as a mail client this month, things
seemed an awful lot easier than they did back in the summer.

(I'm not done yet though. The next challenge is outbound mail -- setting
it up to let me choose between multiple smtp servers.)

Part of the problem with it, I think, is that there's no easy way to
approach the manual -- wherever you start you seem to be coming in in
the middle.

> I used Alpine which reads the server well and works fine with
> emacs... for me and my more limited abilites.

I did consider Alpine. I used Pine on a palmtop for many years and it
was quite adequate, so Alpine seemed a plausible choice. I don't recall
why I rejected it. I thought it was because I couldn't see in the manual
how to set it up to use an external editor, but if you used it with
Emacs, I must be mistaken about that. Still, I think I'll be a lot
happier with the power and flexibility of Gnus now that I almost have it
tamed!

N.

Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[William G Gardella]

nljlistbox2-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org (N. Jackson) writes:

> James Freer <jessejazza3.uk-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> writes:
>
>> Well done because I found Gnus difficult to set up... and gave up.
>
> As far as using it is a mail client I gave up too (temporarily) the
> first time around. But after using it as a newsreader essentially as it
> came out of the box for several months, and gradually tweaking it to my
> liking, when I revisited using it as a mail client this month, things
> seemed an awful lot easier than they did back in the summer.
>
> (I'm not done yet though. The next challenge is outbound mail -- setting
> it up to let me choose between multiple smtp servers.)

You may find `gnus-posting-styles' and the "X-Message-SMTP-Method:" header
(which gnus and message-mode use to hint to smtpmail.el which
mailserver to use) useful for configuring multiple SMTP accounts.  This
renders unnecessary some of the complex hacks on the emacswiki.

Alternatively, you could yse a userspace sendmail-replacement helper
binary, such as msmtp, which is smart enough to use the "From:" header as
a hint of which smtp server to use, and then just configure
`message-send-mail-function' and `sendmail-program' appropriately to use
this binary.

--
Best,
WGG

Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[N. Jackson]

Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org> writes:
> Hi!

Hi Tassilo, thank you for your response.

>> I'd like to be able to see both my read and unread mail in my inbox
>> and have the two distinguished in some way.

> ,----[ C-h v gnus-fetch-old-headers RET ]

How would I go about setting this for (a) specific (server or) servers,
or for (a) specific (group or) groups, or for a specific retrieval method
(i.e. just for nnimap and not for nntp), rather than globally for all of
Gnus?

Restricting the scope of settings is part of the Gnus puzzle that I
haven't figured out yet.

> You can also enter the summary buffer using `C-u <number> RET' instead
> of just `RET'.  That will show you the latest <number> of articles in
> the group, no matter if new or read.

This doesn't quite work for me as I don't know the total number of
messages. However this suggestion led me to discover that I can do a /o
command (gnus-summary-insert-old-articles) and a M-C-t command
(gnus-summary-toggle-threads) (to turn off threading) in the Summary
Buffer when I open my inbox (or other mail folder). This gives me
exactly the view that I want. :)

Now I just need to learn how to configure things so that this is the
view I get automatically in mail folders/groups.

> Of course Gnus does IMAP.

Well, this is very good news. :) After initially being taken aback by
the bluntness of this communication, it encouraged me to dig a bit
deeper. I'm a lot more familiar with Gnus now (after using it as a
newsreader for six months) than I was when I initially tried to set it
up for mail, and things have gone much more smoothly this time
around. After working with it the last couple of days, I almost have it
set up satisfactorily. :)

However, there isn't really any "of course" about it; and "does IMAP" is
not well defined. However, it's looking as if Gnus's IMAP support does the
things that I need.

> ,----[ (info "(gnus)Using IMAP") ]

These three nodes I had read through several times and they don't seem
especially useful beyond getting IMAP mail to behave roughly like POP3
mail.

> Seems you are using `mail-sources' instead of nnimap.

Nope. I was using nnimap. I just didn't have the other pieces of the
puzzle for viewing mail folders / filing mail / and browsing to filed
mail. Those pieces are now almost all in place.
 
>> Did I miss something, or am I correct in thinking Gnus lacks the
>> ability to interact with an IMAP server in that way?

> Yes, you are wrong.

Indeed. Thank you for your insistence on this. I had previously given up
because it didn't seem worth struggling to try get Gnus to do something
if it might not be capable of it. Knowing that it is so capable gave
me the encouragement to find out how to do it! 

> Bye, Tassilo

Bye Tassilo, and thank you.

N.