From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Tim X Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2007 15:20:11 +1000 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Message-ID: <87wstz33hw.fsf@lion.rapttech.com.au> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1191735667 16296 80.91.229.12 (7 Oct 2007 05:41:07 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2007 05:41:07 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sun Oct 07 07:41:05 2007 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1IeOsx-0002QD-7r for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sun, 07 Oct 2007 07:41:03 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1IeOss-0007mA-0X for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sun, 07 Oct 2007 01:40:58 -0400 Original-Path: shelby.stanford.edu!headwall.stanford.edu!newsfeed.news2me.com!newsfeed.icl.net!newsfeed.fjserv.net!newsfeed.arcor.de!newsfeed.kamp.net!newsfeed.kamp.net!213.239.142.2.MISMATCH!feed.xsnews.nl!border-1.ams.xsnews.nl!feeder1.cambrium.nl!feed.tweaknews.nl!tudelft.nl!txtfeed1.tudelft.nl!feeder.news-service.com!sn-xt-ams-06!sn-xt-ams-11!sn-xt-ams-08!sn-post-ams-01!sn-post-sjc-01!supernews.com!corp.supernews.com!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.1.50 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:wQHDXVVQWx1/BWADZ/ZHKWcwbvM= Original-X-Complaints-To: abuse@supernews.com Original-Lines: 70 Original-Xref: shelby.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:152671 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:48179 Archived-At: Andrew Walrond writes: > I've been using Kmail and latterly Thunderbird to manage/organise my > email. I belong to many mailing lists and receive somewhere around 1k > emails a day. > > Since I spend the rest of my day in emacs, I thought I might have a go > at moving my email there as well. > > So, a quick google reveals VM as the front runner for email. Am I right? > Any gotchas or missing features to be aware of? > > TIA > > Andrew Walrond > > when it comes to e-mail, I tend to go against the emacs trend of doing everything in emacs and instead, just use it to read, compose and send mail. I use procmail to sort my mail into various folders and I use spamassassin to classify my mail (called from my procmail script). I've been using VM for about 10 years and on the whole find it very good. It did look like it wasn't going to be maintained for a while, but it does now have a new maintainer and it has some very nice features, such as "personality crisis" (which allows you to have your headers automatically adjusted based on various criteria, such as the address your sending to. Very handy for people with multiple e-mail addresses, such as a private one and a work one. It is also quite easy to configure. I've also used Mew, which is not bad. wonderlust is another reader which seems to have all the standard features. The 'heavy weight' is Gnus. I've looked at it, but to be honest, it has a very very steep learning curve and will take a fair bit to configure. I use Gnus for reading newsgroups and it is excellent at that. It is probably OK for mail and lots of people love it, but I personally never felt comfortable with it and at times, it took a lot of work to find out how to do something which is normally fairly trivial. I also never got comfortable with the mail like newsgroups approach it uses. However, those who have put in the time and stuck with it will swear by it and are likely to sacrifice key family members rather than give it up. I don't know if this is because it is truely wonderful or if they feel they need to invest in it totally in order to justify the effort it takes to get it working just how you want. If you have unusual and extreme mail handling requirements, it is probably the best choice, but if your requirements are fairly standard, you may find it a lot of work for little obvious benefit. some people really like e-mh, which is a nice mail user agent interface. With this approach, you get MH style mail folder directories, which is nice as you have each message in its own file. some of the mailers that rely on a single file or mbox style format can run into trouble if your mail folder gets over a particular size (Emacs has a size limit on the maximum file length it can load. However, this limit is (from memory) pretty high and I've personally never run into it. I do recall a post to this group on ths topic quite recently, so maybe check the archives for more detail. Tim -- tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au