Re: Emacs for mail: VM - WL - GNUS

[Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz>]

Hi Henri-Paul,

On Sat, 04 Dec 2010, Henri-Paul Indiogine wrote:
> Xavier Maillard <xavier@maillard.im> writes:
> > Why ? No time wasted in tweaking the system -i.e. your setup -, it has
> > an awesome GNU Emacs cli, bindings if you need to script something in
> > python, haskell, ... Plus it is extra fast, after all it is just a
> > mailstore !
> >
> > In the past, I spent many hours configuring gnus/wl/your MUA here/ to
> > make it works like I wanted. In the end it was just a (bad) fork of the
> > original and I was not reading my e-mails (my .gnus file was 23k
> > lines...) ;)
> 
> I am intrigued.  I have now been using gnus for quite a while and still
> I am baffled by its complexity.  I am wondering whether notmuchmail has
> the following features that I have implemented in Gnus:
> 
> 1. mail splitting into groups according to who sends it

Notmuch is a search-based client. It can do very fast searches though
all of your mail. You can configure it to search for (almost) whatever
you want. sender address included. However, automatically splitting your
inbox based on the sender would require some scripting to generate the
appropriate queries.

> 2. posting styles: according to which group I am in it will place a
> different signature file in my email.

Notmuch uses standard message-mode for composing and sending mails. I
guess you can configure message mode to do so.

> 3. Gnus is part of Emacs, thus nothing to install, no prerequisites and
> other nastiness.  What is involved in installing notmuchmail?

It is either in your distribution or a simple configure; make; make
install should do the job. It needs Emacs 23 and the following
libraries: glib, gmime and xapian.

-Michal