From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: d@teklibre.org (Dave =?utf-8?Q?T=C3=A4ht?=) Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2009 07:12:44 -0600 Organization: Teklibre - http://www.teklibre.com Message-ID: <87aazf7h2r.fsf_-_@mahal.sjds.teklibre.org> References: <87d45vhcuo.fsf@mahal.sjds.teklibre.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1256481653 32489 80.91.229.12 (25 Oct 2009 14:40:53 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:40:53 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sun Oct 25 15:40:46 2009 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1N24Gy-0007iL-Pa for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:40:45 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:34618 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1N24Gy-00050y-4Y for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:40:44 -0400 Original-Path: news.stanford.edu!usenet.stanford.edu!news.tele.dk!news.tele.dk!small.news.tele.dk!newsfeed.xs4all.nl!newsfeed6.news.xs4all.nl!xs4all!feeder.erje.net!feeder.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 205 Original-X-Trace: news.eternal-september.org U2FsdGVkX1/92hmXa6DPkwjMEVWRlW61g1rEijG4sEB594c6mvtqHYPDUMMVHeXfQyrbTmzFPxcwosc9e/zd19PRz7TPQhGQCF/rk1BAZpLVJYvp6pHGqViJcsbxDp7RGZRogI8HShhbIdf30oXWvw== Original-X-Complaints-To: abuse@eternal-september.org Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:08:32 +0000 (UTC) X-PGP-FP: D179 9E87 2617 CA13 9A84 E833 A5D7 A325 C395 E2E4 X-Auth-Sender: U2FsdGVkX18JUQadGoqNrZSU6meods4vzE74/AbdNGE= X-PGP: 0xC395E2E4 Cancel-Lock: sha1:86MxYv7ezhRUUrsHe+LVE8h8dhU= sha1:A7tHVJCojJxEZSJ54MXIIvqAwxk= User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.1.50 (gnu/linux) Original-Xref: news.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:174140 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:69223 Archived-At: dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs) writes: > A top-post: Here, someone went from Thunderbird (gui, etc) > to emacs, showing what he had to do to succeed. > (I include it all this once, so if expired for you, is > newified again.) > > Question: I use mutt on my isp-shell-account, and like it, > and use .1% of its capability (I think, so powerful is it). > Has anyone switched from mutt to emacs (temporarily or not)? > Comments? > This particular thread diverged later back into discussing GNUs again, so I thought I would provide an update to what I wrote below as I've changed a few things around and am still working through some problems. After running for two months I got a boatload of very large multi-megabyte attachments from several people, and also accumulated a lot of mail in my mbox folder (>120MB). Gnus got slow. I sat down and finally figured out most of how to get maildir working, and switched to that. (Later on I figured out how to get emacs maildir co-exist with imap maildir, but I have not switched to that yet.) That, after 2 months is getting slow, but I have not (yet) implemented expiry the way that I want it to work, and I have high hopes that once that works things will be better. Also I plan to throw hardware at the problem (an intel flash drive) in the fairly near future. Also, I am trying to learn enough about emacs to profile gnus. Perhaps it can be made more co-operatively multitasking - or some of the threaded emacs work going on elsewhere will prove fruitful. The slowest thing in my setup right now is not mail but news, as I turned on nocem support. That takes a very long time to filter the news in emacs. I finally bit the bullet and installed a real news server (inn), which turned out to not be the huge hassle that I remember it to be. With that, nocem support can happen as the feed arrives, not as it is read, and I gain local newsgroups again. Where I'm eventually going with this is developing a 300mw (milliwatt!) mail and news server, several blog posts on that can be found at: http://the-edge.blogspot.com/search/label/pocobelle (As is usual with blogs, it helps to read them in reverse order) Attachments are a real problem. I'll argue that they ended up occupying over 90% of my slowest mailboxes and it is completely unnecessary to keep them in email format once read. I hope to get around to writing some sort of sane procmail filter that will strip out the attachment on incoming and save it somewhere sane (saving me a decision step, anyway) and insert an url to where it ended up. As I wrote below, the advantages of running out of Emacs itself (typing with less pain!) for me outweigh the problems with speed and interactivity. I did, while converting to maildir, try mutt. I liked it, but leaving my abbrevs and shortcuts for it simply wasn't in the cards. I have no opinion on the other mail readers for emacs. Some more comments below. >>I just switched from Thunderbird to GNUS. It's taken me a month to get >>truly happy with it (about 29 days longer than I wanted to spend) and I >>still have some things left to do, but overall I'm glad I made the >>effort. >> >>To this end I made some compromises and changes to my assumptions in >>order to work with how gnus actually worked. Also, my solution is very >>linux specific, and not relevant, really to what you were asking about, >>but I gotta write this up somewhere.... >> >>After fighting with postfix + dovecot, sieve, imap, gnus, and Maildir >>formats for several days, I gave up, and switched to postfix, procmail >>and mbox format, abandoning even the thought of imap. >> >>I did several unusual things, few of which were GNUS specific, (although >>gnus made me do it because I could not get maildir working) but perhaps >>folks would find these alternatives interesting. I evaluated mh, gnus, >>and mews and settled on gnus as being the closest in mindset for what I >>wanted "(set bugs off (do what I am thinking))" >> >>1) I adopted IPv6 for my email requirements, coupled with ca-cert >>certificates for authentication. This gives me a static IP address and >>real AAAA record in DNS so I can actually receive mail on my laptop's >>tunnel, wherever I am, via my stably connected secondary mx host, and I >>can send/receive mail directly to anyone running IPv6 on their mailhost >>(I've only seen bsd.org and isc.org have that turned on), or via that >>secondary mx exchanger. >> >>The certs get rid of sasl which I always thought was a hassle anyway. The ipv6 mail exchanger thing is working great, and several of the lists I read (notably debian) connect directly to me now, without going through intermediaries. I also got my backup mx server to run on a tiny power sipping arm box, which is pretty cool (see the pocobelle blog posts linked above) >> >>2) Instead of IMAP I am just opening emacs frames on other X displays, >>against my already running emacs session. My server is my laptop, not >>some far off imap server. It's cool to keep all my context - especially >>including org-mode - available anywhere I walk in the house or around >>town. This, too, remains great. >> >>3) For backups, rsync run out of cron. I'm not entirely convinced this >>is acceptable so I bcc another account on another mail server on sent mail. Still not satisified with this. >> >>4) For RSS, r2e, which uses rss2email to correctly *text* format most >>RSS feeds. I tried the in-gnus RSS reader, found that it interrupted my >>workflow too much, and dropped it in favor of r2e. I discovered that once I reduced most blogs I used to read to RSS that netnews became much more interesting in comparison. >> >>5) For news, Leafnode. The local nntp cache makes a huge difference in >>speed, and I can read news offline. I liked leafnode so much that I >>subscribed to lkml again via gmane, and the various gnus.* groups. I still am using leafnode. I played around a bit with leafnode2 before deciding to try to setup inn. I have not switched to inn yet. >>8) chat - I dropped pidgin and adopted erc + bitlbee. Bitlbee now does >>skype, too. And otr. Love bitlbee. Problem right now is that it doesn't do yahoo. (Patches are out there, haven't got around to applying them) >>The net benefit to my life is that I just rid myself of several >>applications and their relevant context switches. I would argue that I >>went from about 10-15% emacs usage per day to about 75%. I'm able to do >>things like customize my keyboard to handle my carpalness (like mapping >>' to return) and not have my default keystrokes break other apps. >> >>With Emacs' abbrev mode, im turns automatically into I'm, and with >>auto-capitalize mode (which I put a fix in for on the wiki recently) I >>almost never have to hit a shift key again. Big win. You couldn't get me >>to switch back to any other mail client if you paid me. >> >>I love green on black text everywhere. >> >>I cleared out a lot of screen space by getting rid of menus, icons, >>scrollbars, fringes and other stuff that get in the way. hide-mode-line >>is cool, too. >> >>Supercite is great. The gpg integration is great too. >> >>rss2email has easily put 12 hours a week back into my life that I used >>to spend waiting for blogs to load. I'm spending 4 hours of that on >>netnews, which has been kind of fun in a retro sort of way. >> >>My mail is as fast now as instant messaging. Switching in or out of mail >>mode takes two keys, a split second, and no thought. There's no "Logging >>into server... checking folders... sending mail..." step at all. For the >>first couple weeks I kept running tail -f /var/log/mail.log just because >>I was scared it wasn't working. >> >>I tied mail and org mode notifications into a speech synth. >> >>I can do just about any darn thing I want to with procmail, including >>automagically create mailboxes for any mailing lists I might join. I >>had wished thunderbird would do that for a long time. >> >>And I can take my mail with me, to the beach, or the park, without having >>to be online, and write voluminous emails like this one. >> >>My only major open problem is somewhere in my maildir experiments my >>sent mail folder stopped working. :(. I'll figure it out eventually. >> >>I'm still in a losing fight with how GNUS splits windows on wide displays. >> >>I still have the more prosaic problem of expiring the mailboxes (like >>messages from cron and nagios) that I want to expire the way I want to >>expire them. I like very much the concept of expiring - or at least, >>automatically archiving, mail, much more than I like the idea of >>continuing to have 20,000+ message mailboxes as I have in gmail. Yes, I >>have read how to do it, but regular expressions scare me. I will try it >>on some smaller test mailboxes first. So far, 2000+ message mbox >>mailboxes have been acceptably fast on the hardware I use. >> >>mbox format + archival actually makes sense to me, although I will take >>a stab at Maildir again one of these days. I got maildir working finally (I don't remember how). Getting it to co-exist with dovecot's imap was harder, but I have that running now for a test user. (I will document later). Now, as to whether I need imap or not, I don't know... I really like wandering the house with X on multiple emacs displays. -- Dave Taht http://the-edge.blogspot.com