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: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:06:55 -0600 Organization: Teklibre - http://www.teklibre.com Message-ID: <87d45vhcuo.fsf@mahal.sjds.teklibre.org> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1252823463 32109 80.91.229.12 (13 Sep 2009 06:31:03 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 06:31:03 +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 Sep 13 08:30:56 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 1Mmibv-0008Ai-N5 for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:30:56 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:55144 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Mmibu-0004g3-T6 for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sun, 13 Sep 2009 02:30:54 -0400 Original-Path: news.stanford.edu!usenet.stanford.edu!news.isc.org!mahal.sjds.teklibre.org!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 136 Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: toutatis.isc.org Original-X-Trace: sf1.isc.org 1252807643 66448 149.20.54.64 (13 Sep 2009 02:07:23 GMT) Original-X-Complaints-To: abuse@isc.org Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 02:07:23 +0000 (UTC) X-PGP-FP: D179 9E87 2617 CA13 9A84 E833 A5D7 A325 C395 E2E4 X-PGP: 0xC395E2E4 User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.91 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:36gISnofQQOMjnv4FjQphTL9kGQ= Original-Xref: news.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:172970 X-Mailman-Approved-At: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 02:30:24 -0400 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:68097 Archived-At: Jeff Clough writes: > Okay, so I'm seriously considering switching from Thunderbird to Emacs > (under Windows XP) for my mail and calendar needs, but I haven't used > Emacs for either of these purposes in so long I don't know if it's > feasible, nor am I certain which modes are "best". I'm hoping that > some of you can point me in the right direction. I'd "just do it" as > a test, but I'd rather not go through a crap ton of hassle and > problems only to hear later "You should not have used foo mode for > that, bar mode is what you want". 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 6) To get text boxes from the web into emacs and back, mozdev. 7) For calendar, org-mode. I'm not going to talk about how much more I love org mode the more time I spend in emacs. I could go on for pages about org-mode, but the javascript org-annotation-helper would be a good thing to start raving about if I did. I always found things like evolution and exchange very lightweight for complex task management. Thunderbird did it not at all. 8) chat - I dropped pidgin and adopted erc + bitlbee. Bitlbee now does skype, too. 9) Pastebin on a keystroke from any buffer. Love it. As you can tell, I *really* wanted to be able to receive mail directly to my laptop again, and handle being offline, just like in the good ole days. A lot of the above flowed from that. Writing web pages to parse the output of "batch" and multiple clustered commands struck me as more work than getting certs and ipv6 tunnels and email to work. 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. -- Dave Taht http://the-edge.blogspot.com