Handling mail

Handling mail

[Johan Vromans]

After having used GNU/Emacs+VM for 20-odd years I wonder: is it still
viable to use Emacs to handle modern mail?

Most mail and mail-related packages (e.g. VM, BBDB, MailCrypt, WL)
seem to be outdated and unmaintained for years. Many problems exist
with multi-media mail, Unicode, and so on.

Gnus seems to be the only package that is up-to-date (I use it for
reading news and mailing lists), however I've never been able to live
with it as a news reader. I'm very hooked to VM's virtual folders.
My dearest wish is to continue using Emacs for mail but currently this
feels like a dead end.

What are your ideas and suggestions?

-- Johan

Re: Handling mail

[Bastien]

Hi Johan,

Johan Vromans <jvromans@squirrel.nl> writes:

> Gnus seems to be the only package that is up-to-date (I use it for
> reading news and mailing lists), however I've never been able to live
> with it as a news reader. I'm very hooked to VM's virtual folders.
> My dearest wish is to continue using Emacs for mail but currently this
> feels like a dead end.
>
> What are your ideas and suggestions?

I would suggest you try again learning Gnus, it's just great.

-- 
 Bastien

Re: Handling mail

[Alberto Luaces]

Johan Vromans writes:

> After having used GNU/Emacs+VM for 20-odd years I wonder: is it still
> viable to use Emacs to handle modern mail?
>
> Most mail and mail-related packages (e.g. VM, BBDB, MailCrypt, WL)
> seem to be outdated and unmaintained for years. Many problems exist
> with multi-media mail, Unicode, and so on.
>
> Gnus seems to be the only package that is up-to-date (I use it for
> reading news and mailing lists), however I've never been able to live
> with it as a news reader. I'm very hooked to VM's virtual folders.
> My dearest wish is to continue using Emacs for mail but currently this
> feels like a dead end.
>
> What are your ideas and suggestions?

It's very likely that you have already seen `virtual groups' in gnus. I
don't know if they can match the ones from VM.

As for a BBDB replacement, you could try `org-contacts', which also
has a gnus integration available.

-- 
Alberto

Re: Handling mail

[Richard Riley]

Johan Vromans <jvromans@squirrel.nl> writes:

> After having used GNU/Emacs+VM for 20-odd years I wonder: is it still
> viable to use Emacs to handle modern mail?
>
> Most mail and mail-related packages (e.g. VM, BBDB, MailCrypt, WL)
> seem to be outdated and unmaintained for years. Many problems exist
> with multi-media mail, Unicode, and so on.
>
> Gnus seems to be the only package that is up-to-date (I use it for
> reading news and mailing lists), however I've never been able to live
> with it as a news reader. I'm very hooked to VM's virtual folders.
> My dearest wish is to continue using Emacs for mail but currently this
> feels like a dead end.
>
> What are your ideas and suggestions?

That you try using it for email. It works fine IMO. Gnus IMAP suport has
greatly improved. As for News, I find its way and above better than any
other news reader I have used - that and the convenience of the "emacs
world" being there at my fingertips offsets any benefits of using an
html type/gui front end. Yes, configuring it is a nightmare for
many. But when done its great.

Re: Handling mail

[Johnny]

Johan Vromans <jvromans@squirrel.nl> writes:

> After having used GNU/Emacs+VM for 20-odd years I wonder: is it still
> viable to use Emacs to handle modern mail?
I believe so. I migrated to Gnus some two years ago and see no option of
going back to e.g. internet based mail readers. And at work I constantly
get frustrated with being unable to get Outlook to do automatic
filtering, scoring, expiry, what not.
What do you think is the option and what is lacking in emacs mail
clients?

> Most mail and mail-related packages (e.g. VM, BBDB, MailCrypt, WL)
> seem to be outdated and unmaintained for years. 
Gnus and BBDB have active development. 

> Many problems exist with multi-media mail, Unicode, and so on.
What problems are you encountering with multimedia? I find it great to
be able to define e.g. in Gnus custom handlers to inline word and pdf
docs as text for easy copy paste editing (maybe not exactly multimedia,
but I am not a heavy mail/news multimedia user).

> Gnus seems to be the only package that is up-to-date (I use it for
> reading news and mailing lists), however I've never been able to live
> with it as a news reader. I'm very hooked to VM's virtual folders.
> My dearest wish is to continue using Emacs for mail but currently this
> feels like a dead end.
I am using Gnus for RSS through virtual groups to aggregate specialised
news feeds and with scoring am able to keep up to date with latest
developments easily. However, as I have no exprience with other news
readers I cannot compare.

> What are your ideas and suggestions?
These are my opionons based on my usage and needs, but I'd suggest you
give it a go. Basically, if you want control over your computer usage
and information flow and are willing to configure usage to your needs,
there's no real option (or?). But if you're a casual user only looking
for convenient mail/news and have no need for specific configurations,
there are probably getter solutions. Given your emacs experience, I'd
guess you're in the former group though.

Cheers!

-- 
Johnny

Re: Handling mail

[Johan Vromans]

Thanks for your replies.

> What do you think is the option and what is lacking in emacs mail
> clients?

I think my major problem is history. In 25 years many things have
evolved (changed) in the world of Mail and News, and my setups contain
many quirks to work around limitations that may not exists anymore. I
was an early adopter of MIME, non-ASCII display, GUI Emacs (Epoch) and
Unicode (Mule). The setups may have reached the point of becoming
inconsistent.

The problems that I actually experience during daily use is:

- No proper display if Unicode characters (Emacs and Gnus do this right,
  VM doesn't).

- Mysterious handling of message attachments (some are displayed inline,
  some are displatched to external 'viewers', but most are offered to be
  saved to disk). This may be a problem external to Emacs.

> Gnus and BBDB have active development. 

Gnus, yes. But BBDB?

  "BBDB 2.35 is the current stable released version, released on 
  January 30, 2007."

Seems rather old to me...

>> Gnus seems to be the only package that is up-to-date (I use it for
>> reading news and mailing lists), however I've never been able to live
>> with it as a news reader.

[this should have read "with it as a mail reader"]

I treat mail and news as two different sources of information.

For news (and, in my case, mailing lists) I read what's new and
interesting, then all's gone (gnus-summary-catchup-and exit) unless I
explicitly mark articles to keep.

For mail, every message stays in my mailbox until I explicitly file or
delete it. When I tried Gnus to read mail (years ago) I couldn't get it
to just leave the messages. After reading a message it must be kept
explictly otherwise it's gone.

Moreover, VM provides some nifty features that I haven't yet found out
how to do with Gnus:

- Automatically infer the name of the file to save a message into,
  depending on the sender name (and using the mail-folder property in
  the BBDB, if any).

- In the summary, display the name of the recipient if the sender is me
  ('me' being a list of mail addresses). This is particularly handy
  since I save BCC's of outgoing messages in my primary mailbox.

- Automatically (or on demand) change my from, reply-to, selected
  headers and signature depending on which of my email addresses the
  message was sent to.

> I'd suggest you give it a go. Basically, if you want control over your
> computer usage and information flow and are willing to configure usage
> to your needs, there's no real option (or?).

I guess I have to bite the bullit and throw away my VM and Gnus config
and start from scratch, using the features that are available now.

Not an easy task, though...

-- Johan

Re: Handling mail

[Rasmus]

> Gnus, yes. But BBDB?
>
>   "BBDB 2.35 is the current stable released version, released on 
>   January 30, 2007."
>
> Seems rather old to me...
>
> I treat mail and news as two different sources of information.

We all do. Gnus will treat mail different than news if you want.

(I use a local Dovecot IMAP server + offlineimap for mail, gwene for RSS
and Gmane and some local news-server for news). 

> For mail, every message stays in my mailbox until I explicitly file or
> delete it. When I tried Gnus to read mail (years ago) I couldn't get it
> to just leave the messages. After reading a message it must be kept
> explictly otherwise it's gone.

You may set a flag in certain groups (I don't remember it at the
moment). If this is set old mails will be shown. Whenever I enter a
mail-group 200 articles are shown. If I want to show more I may using
M-u RET, but usually IMAP search is better (G G).



> - Automatically infer the name of the file to save a message into,
>   depending on the sender name (and using the mail-folder property in
>   the BBDB, if any).

Check out Gnus  posting style (built in) or Gnus Alias. The latter is
much easier to use. 

> - In the summary, display the name of the recipient if the sender is me
>   ('me' being a list of mail addresses). This is particularly handy
>   since I save BCC's of outgoing messages in my primary mailbox.

There are some variables and functions concerned with your mail. I have
never used them.

> - Automatically (or on demand) change my from, reply-to, selected
>   headers and signature depending on which of my email addresses the
>   message was sent to.

Again, Gnus Alias or Gnus Posting style will do what you want.

For example using Gnus-Alias my name and mail is changed when I post to
a news-group. Inspecting my from line the proper SMTP server is chosen.

> I guess I have to bite the bullit and throw away my VM and Gnus config
> and start from scratch, using the features that are available now.

You will be very happy. (My Gnus config is a mere 400 lines :)

–Rasmus

-- 
Sent from my Emacs

Re: Handling mail

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 15.07.2011 um 20:58 schrieb Johan Vromans:

> I guess I have to bite the bullit and throw away my VM and Gnus config
> and start from scratch, using the features that are available now.
> 
> Not an easy task, though...

What about creating a new user account and using that account to access your mail boxes? When you can set your client to leave the messages on the server and just use copies you don't loose a message...

After the training phase you can take over the found settings to your own account and init file.

--
Greetings

  Pete

War springs from unseen and generally insignificant causes.
				– Anonymous

Re: Handling mail

[Uday Reddy]

On 7/15/2011 7:58 PM, Johan Vromans wrote:

>
> The problems that I actually experience during daily use is:
>
> - No proper display if Unicode characters (Emacs and Gnus do this right,
>    VM doesn't).
>
> - Mysterious handling of message attachments (some are displayed inline,
>    some are displatched to external 'viewers', but most are offered to be
>    saved to disk). This may be a problem external to Emacs.

What version of VM are you using?

The handling of message attachments is handled by your option settings, 
such as vm-mime-internal-content-types and 
vm-mime-external-content-types-alist etc.  What are your settings for 
these variables?  Do you have emacs-w3m installed for handling html?

> Moreover, VM provides some nifty features that I haven't yet found out
> how to do with Gnus:
>
> - Automatically infer the name of the file to save a message into,
>    depending on the sender name (and using the mail-folder property in
>    the BBDB, if any).
>
> - In the summary, display the name of the recipient if the sender is me
>    ('me' being a list of mail addresses). This is particularly handy
>    since I save BCC's of outgoing messages in my primary mailbox.
>
> - Automatically (or on demand) change my from, reply-to, selected
>    headers and signature depending on which of my email addresses the
>    message was sent to.

Absolutely.  I haven't tried the other mail clients.  So I can't speak 
for them.  But VM does have myriads of little features that make life 
convenient.

Cheers,
Uday

Re: Handling mail

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On Thu, Jul 14 2011, Johan Vromans wrote:

> After having used GNU/Emacs+VM for 20-odd years I wonder: is it still
> viable to use Emacs to handle modern mail?
>
> Most mail and mail-related packages (e.g. VM, BBDB, MailCrypt, WL)
> seem to be outdated and unmaintained for years. Many problems exist
> with multi-media mail, Unicode, and so on.
>
> Gnus seems to be the only package that is up-to-date (I use it for
> reading news and mailing lists), however I've never been able to live
> with it as a news reader. I'm very hooked to VM's virtual folders.
> My dearest wish is to continue using Emacs for mail but currently this
> feels like a dead end.
>
> What are your ideas and suggestions?
>
> -- Johan

Try gnus, as others have said, and also BBDB is under fairly active
development -- version 3 is underway. Some people have virulent
reactions against it, but they must have some use-cases that I don't,
because I've found it to work very well.

E

Re: Handling mail

[Richard Riley]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> On Thu, Jul 14 2011, Johan Vromans wrote:
>
>> After having used GNU/Emacs+VM for 20-odd years I wonder: is it still
>> viable to use Emacs to handle modern mail?
>>
>> Most mail and mail-related packages (e.g. VM, BBDB, MailCrypt, WL)
>> seem to be outdated and unmaintained for years. Many problems exist
>> with multi-media mail, Unicode, and so on.
>>
>> Gnus seems to be the only package that is up-to-date (I use it for
>> reading news and mailing lists), however I've never been able to live
>> with it as a news reader. I'm very hooked to VM's virtual folders.
>> My dearest wish is to continue using Emacs for mail but currently this
>> feels like a dead end.
>>
>> What are your ideas and suggestions?
>>
>> -- Johan
>
> Try gnus, as others have said, and also BBDB is under fairly active
> development -- version 3 is underway. Some people have virulent
> reactions against it, but they must have some use-cases that I don't,
> because I've found it to work very well.

+1 on BBDB 3 - but do read the release notes and google. It will
probably bomb out rapidly when you first try it but a google or two
later and it'll work fine in most cases I suspect. I recall having to
make some changes with alias handling and expanding for mail lists but
that was about it (and this primarily because of function name changes).

Re: Handling mail

[Bill Wohler]

Johan Vromans <jvromans@squirrel.nl> writes:

> After having used GNU/Emacs+VM for 20-odd years I wonder: is it still
> viable to use Emacs to handle modern mail?

I'm still happy with MH-E. See mh-e.sf.net.

-- 
Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com> aka <Bill.Wohler@nasa.gov>
http://www.newt.com/wohler/
GnuPG ID:610BD9AD