Re: Handling mail

[Johnny <yggdrasil@gmx.co.uk>]

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 seem to be outdated and unmaintained for years.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