Gnus for Mail (was: Anyone gone from mutt to Emacs? was: Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar)

[Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc>]

On Mon, Oct 12 2009, Joost Kremers wrote:

> Teemu Likonen wrote:
>> If so I'd like to point out that you can configure Gnus to
>> always show all messages if you want to.
>
> But I'd like to keep that behaviour for news groups. (Even better
> would be if that behaviour is configurable for each mail folder
> separately, so I could read mailing lists as if they were news
> groups.)

You can configure almost anything on per group or topic (by regexp,
etc.).

> Another thing I didn't like about Gnus' handling of mail was the
> fact that you have to enter a mail folder explicitly. If mutt is
> started, it automatically enters the default mail folder, which is
> where most of my mail comes in.

Put it in some hook...

,----[ (info "(gnus)Startup Variables") ]
| `gnus-started-hook'
|      A hook that is run as the very last thing after starting up Gnus
|      successfully.
`----

> I have two IMAP accounts on different servers. In my current setup I
> have three mutt instances running inside a screen session, so that I
> can switch very quickly between the two IMAP servers (each opened in
> a separate mutt) and my local mail boxes (opened in the third
> mutt). I haven't found a way to replicate such a setup with Gnus.

Gnus supports multiple IMAP servers and you can display several groups
at the same time as well:

,----[ (info "(gnus)Misc Article") ]
| `gnus-single-article-buffer'
|      If non-`nil', use the same article buffer for all the groups.
|      (This is the default.)  If `nil', each group will have its own
|      article buffer.
`----

> I also seem to remember that Gnus doesn't check for new mail
> automatically 

,----[ (info "(gnus)Daemons") ]
| Gnus, being larger than any program ever written (allegedly), does lots
| of strange stuff that you may wish to have done while you're not
| present.  For instance, you may want it to check for new mail once in a
| while.
`----

> and checking for new mail manually would freeze Emacs until all
> groups and IMAP folders were checked, with would often take quite a
> long time...

People facing this problem often run two Emacs instances, one for
Gnus, one for the rest.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/