Re: Alternatives to Gnus

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

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

> Hello,
>
> After more than 2 years of gnus daily usage, I've finally decided to
> give up :(: too much pain, too much trouble, too much complex, too
> slow and too much wasted time. Gnus has definitively not been designed
> for me.
>
> So I'd like to find something else to use (and I'm sure it should
> exist because I'm pretty convinced that I'm not the only one in this
> case) to read my emails and news groups.
>
> I started to use Gnus because I run emacs in terminal mode and I want
> to do so when reading my emails/articles. I also want to use emacs to
> compose them.
>
> From my point of view, the most important features are: stability/
> robustness, speed and last but not the least usability. I think
> Thunderbird has them but unfortunately it doesn't have a terminal mode
> and can't use emacs in terminal mode to compose emails (yes it can
> with emacs in window mode but it's quite hackish).
>
> 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. I use
gnus for newsgroups and think its really good at that. I tried it for
mail, but to be honest, found it less so. I therefore use VM and Mew for
reading mail.  

Mew also supports reading news, but I've never used it for that. 

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.
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. 

The sources are available on launchpad http://launchpad.net/vm

Tim



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tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au