Re: Alternatives to Gnus

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com> writes:

> On Sep 2, 12:31 am, Tim X <t...@nospam.dev.null> wrote:
>> Francis Moreau <francis.m...@gmail.com> writes:
>> > Could the emacs users give me some alternatives ?
>>
>> I'm not convinced that there are any huge advantages in having the same
>> program to both read/send/manage email and read/send/manage news.
>
> Well a common interface: less key bindings, one config file etc...

IMO the common interface is emacs and the common configuration file is
.emacs

My point re: advantages is that the similarity between news and mail
is really only surface deep. How I want to manage the messages, the type
of filtering I do, where things are stored etc are quite different. I've
found it rare that one program does both well - you tend to either have
news being forced into a mail type paradigm or mail being forced into a
news type one.

I prefer the right tool for the right job. Gnus was written primarily as
an nntp client and mail was (I think) a secondary goal. Mew appears to
be primarily a mail user agent with nntp as a secondary goal.

>
>> I use
>> gnus for newsgroups and think its really good at that. I tried it for
>
> I don't agree obviously.
>
>> mail, but to be honest, found it less so. I therefore use VM and Mew for
>> reading mail.
>
> Why are you using both of them ?
>
Because I am on the VM development team. Sometimes, while fixing bugs or
adding features, my copy of VM may not be stable, but I need to maintain
a stable environment. I also like to have another mail reader available
for comparison purposes. 

>>
>> Mew also supports reading news, but I've never used it for that.
>>
>
> I took a quick look at its documentation and I haven't seen any news
> reading support.
>
> Is it well supported in Mew or is it something like using gnus for
> emails ?

as I said, I've never used it for news, so I cannot say.

Tim


>
>> I am a member of the VM developer team. VM is an excellent mail reader
>> with a lot of power/flexibility, which has been around for a long time.
>> After it's original developer moved on to other things, it did languish
>> a bit. However, since last year, a number of people have been working on
>> it to update it and integrate many of the add on features that have been
>> contributed by various people. Development is very active and a number
>> of enhancements have been added over the last few months, including
>> improved imap integration, better threading, performance improvements
>> for large mail files, thunderbird support and many other improvements.
>
> Ok that sounds interesting but it leaves the question about the news
> reader open.
>
>> There is still a lot to be done, but if your after a stable mail reader
>> which is under actie development with people who will respond to
>> questions and bug reports etc, it is worth looking at. We would
>> appreciate having more users who run under the console rather than GUI.
>>
>
> That's definitively a good point, and it one of the main reasons I'm
> leaving gnus. I often felt lonely when I was hit by the numerous
> issues I had with Gnus.
>
> Thanks

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au