Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Dave Täht]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> 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

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

[David Combs]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 7211 bytes --]

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?

Thanks!
David

------- Now "newifying" way-prior post:

In article <87d45vhcuo.fsf@mahal.sjds.teklibre.org>,
Dave Täht <d@teklibre.org> wrote:
>Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> 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

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

[Matt Lundin]

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?

Yes, I have. Both Gnus and Wanderlust are fantastic email clients. There
are a lot of configuration examples online, if you want to get started
with either of them. 

What specifically do you want to know?

- Matt

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

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

>>>>> "Matt" == Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org> writes:

    Matt> 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?

    Matt> Yes, I have. Both Gnus and Wanderlust are fantastic email clients. There
    Matt> are a lot of configuration examples online, if you want to get started
    Matt> with either of them. 

I have too -- I moved from mutt (many years) to Wanderlust and am quite happy
with it. I've been trying gnus as well, but I never succeeded in setting it up
to my satisfaction.

I've written a bit about it:
http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/06/e-mail-with-wanderlust.html
http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/09/wanderlust-tips-and-tricks.html

But WL and Gnus are very powerful -- but if you only use .1% of the
capabilities, it might be overkill... Although even then, the integration with
the rest of my workflow is nice.

mutt is a find program, but the scripting is no match for what emacs-based
clients can do.

Best wishes,
Dirk.

-- 
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema                  Helsinki, Finland
e:djcb@djcbsoftware.nl           w:www.djcbsoftware.nl
pgp: D09C E664 897D 7D39 5047 A178 E96A C7A1 017D DA3C

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

[Joost Kremers]

David Combs wrote:
> 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?

I did, a couple of years ago, switching to mutt+slrn to Gnus. I ended up
switching back after a month or so.

Gnus for news is fine, slrn works in much the same way, but I couldn't get used
to Gnus' handling of email. Gnus treats every mail folder in the same way that
it does a news group, and I simply couldn't get used to that.

I've considered using one of the email clients for Emacs, but none seems to have
been designed with the possibility of having more than one (IMAP)-server in mind.


-- 
Joost Kremers                                      joostkremers@yahoo.com
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)

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

[Teemu Likonen]

On 2009-10-12 15:22 (UTC), Joost Kremers wrote:

> Gnus for news is fine, slrn works in much the same way, but I couldn't
> get used to Gnus' handling of email. Gnus treats every mail folder in
> the same way that it does a news group, and I simply couldn't get used
> to that.

Do you mean that by default it shows only new messages when you enter a
mail group? If so I'd like to point out that you can configure Gnus to
always show all messages if you want to. At least I feel that I can make
Gnus look like a normal mail client.

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

[Joost Kremers]

Teemu Likonen wrote:
> On 2009-10-12 15:22 (UTC), Joost Kremers wrote:
>
>> Gnus for news is fine, slrn works in much the same way, but I couldn't
>> get used to Gnus' handling of email. Gnus treats every mail folder in
>> the same way that it does a news group, and I simply couldn't get used
>> to that.
>
> Do you mean that by default it shows only new messages when you enter a
> mail group?

That was the major problem, yes. I recently took another look at Gnus and noted
that the manual said it is possible but cumbersome to make Gnus work like a more
"standard" mail client.

> 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.)

> At least I feel that I can make
> Gnus look like a normal mail client.

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.

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.

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


-- 
Joost Kremers                                      joostkremers@yahoo.com
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)

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

[Reiner Steib]

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/

Re: Gnus for Mail

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:12:40 +0200 Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> wrote: 

RS> On Mon, Oct 12 2009, Joost Kremers wrote:

>> 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...

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

It's also worth noting that Tom Tromey and Giuseppe are specifically
interested in improving this aspect of Gnus with their work on
multithreading Emacs.  It's not done but they have made lots of
progress.  See emacs-devel for details.

Ted

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

[Richard Riley]

Joost Kremers <joostkremers@yahoo.com> writes:

> David Combs wrote:
>> 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?
>
> I did, a couple of years ago, switching to mutt+slrn to Gnus. I ended up
> switching back after a month or so.
>
> Gnus for news is fine, slrn works in much the same way, but I couldn't get used
> to Gnus' handling of email. Gnus treats every mail folder in the same way that
> it does a news group, and I simply couldn't get used to that.

In what way did that differ from how you use any other email client?

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

[Matt Lundin]

Joost Kremers <joostkremers@yahoo.com> writes:

> David Combs wrote:
>> 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?
>
> I did, a couple of years ago, switching to mutt+slrn to Gnus. I ended
> up switching back after a month or so.
>
> Gnus for news is fine, slrn works in much the same way, but I couldn't
> get used to Gnus' handling of email. Gnus treats every mail folder in
> the same way that it does a news group, and I simply couldn't get used
> to that.

If I'm reading the manual correctly, you can change this behavior for
mail groups using group parameters:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Group-Parameters.html

(See the "display" option.)

>
> I've considered using one of the email clients for Emacs, but none
>seems to have been designed with the possibility of having more than
>one (IMAP)-server in mind.

I believe Wanderlust can handle multiple IMAP servers. See the syntax
for adding new IMAP groups/folders:

http://www.gohome.org/wl/doc/wl_19.html#SEC19

- Matt

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

[Tim X]

Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org> writes:

> Joost Kremers <joostkremers@yahoo.com> writes:
>
>> David Combs wrote:
>>> 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?
>>
>> I did, a couple of years ago, switching to mutt+slrn to Gnus. I ended
>> up switching back after a month or so.
>>
>> Gnus for news is fine, slrn works in much the same way, but I couldn't
>> get used to Gnus' handling of email. Gnus treats every mail folder in
>> the same way that it does a news group, and I simply couldn't get used
>> to that.
>
> If I'm reading the manual correctly, you can change this behavior for
> mail groups using group parameters:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Group-Parameters.html
>
> (See the "display" option.)
>
>>
>> I've considered using one of the email clients for Emacs, but none
>>seems to have been designed with the possibility of having more than
>>one (IMAP)-server in mind.
>
> I believe Wanderlust can handle multiple IMAP servers. See the syntax
> for adding new IMAP groups/folders:
>
> http://www.gohome.org/wl/doc/wl_19.html#SEC19
>

The mew emacs mail client will also handle multiple imap, pop and mbox
folders. VM can also do it and as mentioned, so can gnus.

My experience has been

1. VM easiest to setup. Whent for a while without any development, but
things have improved over the last couple of years. 

2. Mew. A little harder to setup as some of the concepts were not as
intuitive/familiar as I was use to. However, once setup, it works well. 

3. Gnus. Quite complex to setup and takes some time to get configured
exactly as you want. However, probably the most powerful client I've
ever used. Steep learning curve, but probably worth the effort if you
have more complex requirements. 

I don't use Gnus at present because I simply didn't have the need for it
anymore. I now use a much simpler setup that retrieves the mail using
fetchmail (I know some are critical of fetchmail, but it has worked
perfectly for me for a long time. Using it avoids temporary emacs
freezes that can occur with some of the mail clients when they retrieve
mail). I use procmail to sort the mail and now, I can use any of the
clients to read my mail. 

The downside of this approach is for when you have a remote imap server
where you want to manage all your mail on the remote server i.e. create
new remote folders, move mail between remote folders etc. I've found mew
pretty good at that, but no longer have that requirement myself.

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

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

[Jonathan Groll]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 02:11:07AM +0000, David Combs wrote:
>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?

Like you I'm a mutt user who looks longingly into gnus-land but don't
know if I have the energy to make the transition.

Even after setting up a basic .gnus so that I could see the mails on
my local IMAP server, I still had to stumble my way along. Pressing ^
to subscribe to my local IMAP 'newsgroups' was not intuitive.

Before it'll be much use to me, I realised I still need to figure out
how to:
(0) Work out how to NOT have to subscribe to my inbox every time I
start gnus!
(1) Configure my summary INBOX buffer so that it shows the columns I
want and is sorted like I want
(2) Get BBDB address completion working
(3) Do something about mail indexing
(4) Work out how to read HTML mails that people send me with w3m

None of these problems are on their own insurmountable, it just
requires a lot of energy, and from where I stand doesn't offer me
convincing benefits over using mutt with emacs 'set' as editor.

I've put a lot of effort in over the last while getting mutt to work
as I like it, and the increased benefits of using GNUs may not be
worth the pain involved in getting there. Or maybe they do?

Cheers,
Jonathan

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

[Reiner Steib]

On Wed, Oct 14 2009, Jonathan Groll wrote:

> (0) Work out how to NOT have to subscribe to my inbox every time I
> start gnus!

This shouldn't be necessary.  Maybe you are doing something wrong.

> (1) Configure my summary INBOX buffer so that it shows the columns I
> want and is sorted like I want

,----[ (info "(gnus)Summary Buffer Lines") ]
| 3.1.1 Summary Buffer Lines
| --------------------------
| 
| You can change the format of the lines in the summary buffer by changing
| the `gnus-summary-line-format' variable.
`----

,----[ (info "(gnus)Sorting the Summary Buffer") ]
| 3.10 Sorting the Summary Buffer
| ===============================
| 
| If you are using a threaded summary display, you can sort the threads by
| setting `gnus-thread-sort-functions', which can be either a single
| function, a list of functions, or a list containing functions and `(not
| some-function)' elements.
| [...]
|    If you are using an unthreaded display for some strange reason or
| other, you have to fiddle with the `gnus-article-sort-functions'
| variable.  It is very similar to the `gnus-thread-sort-functions',
| except that it uses slightly different functions for article
| comparison.
`----

> (2) Get BBDB address completion working

(require 'bbdb)
(bbdb-initialize 'gnus 'message)

> (3) Do something about mail indexing

,----[ (info "(gnus)Searching") ]
| 2.18 Searching
| ==============
| 
| * Menu:
| 
| * nnir::                     Searching on IMAP, with swish, namazu, etc.
| * nnmairix::                 Searching maildir, MH or mbox with Mairix.
`----

> (4) Work out how to read HTML mails that people send me with w3m

w3m is the default (in the current Gnus version) if w3m (the binary)
and/or emacs-w3m are installed.

,----[ (info "(emacs-mime)Display Customization") ]
| `mm-text-html-renderer'
|      This selects the function used to render HTML.  The predefined
|      renderers are selected by the symbols `w3', `w3m'(1), `links',
|      `lynx', `w3m-standalone' or `html2text'.  If `nil' use an external
|      viewer.  You can also specify a function, which will be called
|      with a MIME handle as the argument.
`----

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

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

[Richard Riley]

Jonathan Groll <lists@groll.co.za> writes:

> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 02:11:07AM +0000, David Combs wrote:
>>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?
>
> Like you I'm a mutt user who looks longingly into gnus-land but don't
> know if I have the energy to make the transition.
>
> Even after setting up a basic .gnus so that I could see the mails on
> my local IMAP server, I still had to stumble my way along. Pressing ^
> to subscribe to my local IMAP 'newsgroups' was not intuitive.

Lack of menus or useful menus is often an emacs issue for some : but in
this case the Gnus menu has an "enter servers" entry with "^" as the
key.

>
> Before it'll be much use to me, I realised I still need to figure out
> how to:
> (0) Work out how to NOT have to subscribe to my inbox every time I
> start gnus!

Auto saves here. I dont know off hand if I enabled it. I turned off
saving the .newsrc file however to speed things
up. (gnus-save-newsrc-file),

> (1) Configure my summary INBOX buffer so that it shows the columns I
> want and is sorted like I want

It can be a difficulty I agree. But there are examples in googleland and
the manual.

> (2) Get BBDB address completion working

Hmmm. Just works here. Did you (bbdb-insinuate-gnus) ?

> (3) Do something about mail indexing

I used to use Mairix and recently moved to dovecots own indexing
method. I have a key bound to gnus-group-make-nnir-group to search the
index. The index is automatically created by dovecot in my case.

> (4) Work out how to read HTML mails that people send me with w3m

There are plenty of examples of this in google land and in the manual
but it can be quite daunting at first sight I agree!

The relevant entries for me are, I think :

       ;; Use emacs-w3m to render html mails and display images
       mm-text-html-renderer 'w3m
       mm-inline-text-html-with-images t
       mm-inline-large-images t
       mm-verify-option 'always
       mm-decrypt-option nil
       mm-discouraged-alternatives '("text/html" "text/richtext")
       mm-automatic-display '("text/html")
       mm-attachment-override-types '("image/.*")
       mm-external-terminal-program (quote urxvt)
       gnus-ignored-mime-types '("text/x-vcard")
       w3m-key-binding 'info
       w3m-cookie-accept-bad-cookies (quote ask)
       w3m-use-cookies t
       w3m-safe-url-regexp nil
       mm-w3m-safe-url-regexp nil

>
> None of these problems are on their own insurmountable, it just
> requires a lot of energy, and from where I stand doesn't offer me
> convincing benefits over using mutt with emacs 'set' as editor.

I decided to bite the bullet so that I could have all the other benefits
of emacs with email. Translations, tags, org-mode links, w3m, bookmarks
etc etc.

> I've put a lot of effort in over the last while getting mutt to work
> as I like it, and the increased benefits of using GNUs may not be
> worth the pain involved in getting there. Or maybe they do?

I think it depends how much time you spend in emacs. I tend to live in
it so it was worth the effort. I used Mutt for a while and liked it too.

If it's any help and you feel like experimenting, my somewhat messy
gnus file is here:-

http://richardriley.net/projects/emacs/dotemacs#sec-2

And I admit its a bit of a mess and quite daunting. I need to prune it.

regards

r.

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Dave Täht]

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

Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Francis Moreau]

d@teklibre.org (Dave Täht) writes:

[...]

>
> 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. 
>

Does that mean you store all LKML traffic on you machine ?

I actually use news groups to avoid this so it sounds a bit weird.

Thanks
-- 
Francis