Reading/Managing mail with emacs

Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Andrew Walrond]

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

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Leo]

On 2007-10-06 09:43 +0100, Andrew Walrond wrote:
> 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

       Use the most powerful email client -- http://gnus.org/

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Floyd L. Davidson]

Andrew Walrond <andrew@walrond.org> wrote:
>So, a quick google reveals VM as the front runner for email. Am I right?
>Any gotchas or missing features to be aware of?

GNUS is the heavy weight champ.

A few hints at what can be done...  my ~/.gnus.el file
is 58k bytes.  I'm not really any great shakes at
hacking elisp either; but over the years things get
added here and there. :-)

The one "problem" with running gnus is that it
necessarily creates a large number of buffers,
customizes menus, etc etc; and basically takes over
Emacs.  If you run Emacs as an edit server (highly
recommended), it works much better to invoke an Emacs
process separately from that server to run gnus for
Usenet and email.

I read Usenet and email all as one application.  Email
"groups" appear to just be added newsgroups.  (A
separate process actually fetches the mail; hence, when
newgroups get updated, new email is also transfered to
control of gnus.)

It works very nicely that way, and eventually you might
get around to such things as customized keybindings,
filters, and who knows what.  The initial configuration
is not simple though!  For example, you would probably
want each mailing list to be seen as a distinct
"newsgroup", and you might want you outgoing mail to
those groups archived separately.  You also might want
distinct headers and/or signature lines for each group.
That's just for starters...

Look for example configurations on the net, and check
out gnu.emacs.gnus.

-- 
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)              floyd@apaflo.com

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Alexey Pustyntsev]

Leo <sdl.web@gmail.com> writes:

> On 2007-10-06 09:43 +0100, Andrew Walrond wrote:
>> 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
>
>        Use the most powerful email client -- http://gnus.org/

++

-- 
Rgds
Alexey

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Daniel Pittman]

Andrew Walrond <andrew@walrond.org> 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?  

No, rmail, Gnus, Mew and Wanderlust are also all well used.  I chose
Gnus, personally, but you should review the range before selecting the
tool that best meets your needs.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
Daniel Pittman <daniel@cybersource.com.au>           Phone: 03 9621 2377
Level 4, 10 Queen St, Melbourne             Web: http://www.cyber.com.au
Cybersource: Australia's Leading Linux and Open Source Solutions Company

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Reiner Steib]

On Sat, Oct 06 2007, Floyd L. Davidson wrote:

> GNUS is the heavy weight champ.

s/GNUS/Gnus/, see (info "(gnus)History").

> The one "problem" with running gnus is that it necessarily creates a
> large number of buffers, customizes menus, etc etc; and basically
> takes over Emacs.

Huh?  Changes menus, tool bars, ... only happens in Gnus buffers
unless there is some bug.

> If you run Emacs as an edit server (highly recommended), it works
> much better to invoke an Emacs process separately from that server
> to run gnus for Usenet and email.

I guess that is what many Gnus users do, because some Gnus operations
(network, scoring, ...)  might take quite some time.

> Look for example configurations on the net, and check
> out gnu.emacs.gnus.

Configuration examples on the net often tend to be outdated.  Don't
use them unless you know what they are doing by reading the *current*
Gnus documentation, i.e. use `<f1> v', `<f1> f', and consult the
manual (info "(gnus)Top").

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

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Andreas Eder]

Hi Daniel,

>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net> writes:

    Daniel> No, rmail, Gnus, Mew and Wanderlust are also all well used.  I chose
    Daniel> Gnus, personally, but you should review the range before selecting the
    Daniel> tool that best meets your needs.

And there is also mh-e, an interface to MH and nmh.
 Have a loo at http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/ and especially
 http://mh-e.sourceforge.net/manual/ the mh-e manual.

'Andreas
-- 
Wherever I lay my .emacs, there's my $HOME.

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Tim X]

Andrew Walrond <andrew@walrond.org> 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

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Sivaram Neelakantan]

Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> writes:


[...]

>
> 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. 
>


Sometimes in my saner moments, I do wonder why I use Gnus.  :-)

I can't recall why I decided on Gnus (now, living dangerously, on the
CVS version) but it worked the first time I tried.  One thing I
distinctly remember is, the effort to learn it.  Simple things to
me(coming from a clicky world) seems so difficult to do.  The
manual,ahh the manual is a thing of beauty;  It was incomprehensible
then and parts of it still are. :-)

I agree that if standard mail is all you want, then Gnus might not be
the one for use but on the other hand, if you think you might want a
lot of things that the mail client should automatically do, then Gnus
might be the best bet.
  
[...]



 sivaram
 -- 

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Joel J. Adamson]

Sivaram Neelakantan <nsivaram.net@gmail.com> writes:

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

Gnus does so many things that this is the one Emacs mode where I
regularly use the menus.  I always have the reference card (which is
six pages long) nearby.

> Sometimes in my saner moments, I do wonder why I use Gnus.  :-)
>
> I can't recall why I decided on Gnus (now, living dangerously, on the
> CVS version) but it worked the first time I tried.

For me, the first time I failed miserably at using it, but now I have
gotten it to work and I love it.  It just goes toward making the
all-in-one sickness progress.

Joel

-- 
Joel J. Adamson
Biostatistician
Pediatric Psychopharmacology Research Unit
Massachusetts General Hospital
Boston, MA  02114
(617) 643-1432
(303) 880-3109

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Sven Bretfeld]

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On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 09:43:22AM +0100, Andrew Walrond wrote:
> 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?

Just a completely different suggestion. Why not use Mutt and let it
run in an Emacs ansi-term? I do it that way since yesterday, and it
works splendit.

Amy, from this list, helped me to write a function (to be exact, she
wrote the function all alone) that calls the ansi-term, starts Mutt,
or changes to this buffer if it's already running. I mapped it to F9,
and Mutt is ready whenever I hit that key.

A true rival for Gnus, VM and MEW.

Greetings,

Sven

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Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Joel J. Adamson]

Sven Bretfeld <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch> writes:

> On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 09:43:22AM +0100, Andrew Walrond wrote:
>> So, a quick google reveals VM as the front runner for email. Am I right?
>> Any gotchas or missing features to be aware of?

A missing feature: somebody told me it's not being maintained.

A gotcha: convert once locked up my computer completely while trying
to view a mail with attachments.

VM was great with XEmacs, when I switched to Emacs, everything went
all screwy.

Joel

-- 
Joel J. Adamson
Biostatistician
Pediatric Psychopharmacology Research Unit
Massachusetts General Hospital
Boston, MA  02114
(617) 643-1432
(303) 880-3109

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[CHENG Gao]

*On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 09:57:40 -0400
* jadamson@partners.org (Joel J. Adamson) climbed out of the dark hell and cried out:

> Sven Bretfeld <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch> writes:
>
>> On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 09:43:22AM +0100, Andrew Walrond wrote:
>>> So, a quick google reveals VM as the front runner for email. Am I right?
>>> Any gotchas or missing features to be aware of?
>
> A missing feature: somebody told me it's not being maintained.

Somebody gave you false inteligence. VM got a new maintainer and new
site - http://www.nongnu.org/viewmail/ .

>
> A gotcha: convert once locked up my computer completely while trying
> to view a mail with attachments.
>
> VM was great with XEmacs, when I switched to Emacs, everything went
> all screwy.
>
> Joel
>
> -- 
> Joel J. Adamson
> Biostatistician
> Pediatric Psychopharmacology Research Unit
> Massachusetts General Hospital
> Boston, MA  02114
> (617) 643-1432
> (303) 880-3109

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Joel J. Adamson]

CHENG Gao <chenggao@gmail.com> writes:

> *On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 09:57:40 -0400
> * jadamson@partners.org (Joel J. Adamson) climbed out of the dark hell and cried out:
>
>> Sven Bretfeld <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch> writes:
>>
>>> On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 09:43:22AM +0100, Andrew Walrond wrote:
>>>> So, a quick google reveals VM as the front runner for email. Am I right?
>>>> Any gotchas or missing features to be aware of?
>>
>> A missing feature: somebody told me it's not being maintained.
>
> Somebody gave you false inteligence. VM got a new maintainer and new
> site - http://www.nongnu.org/viewmail/ .

Well that's good; I stand corrected.

Joel

-- 
Joel J. Adamson
Biostatistician
Pediatric Psychopharmacology Research Unit
Massachusetts General Hospital
Boston, MA  02114
(617) 643-1432
(303) 880-3109

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Tim X]

jadamson@partners.org (Joel J. Adamson) writes:

> Sven Bretfeld <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch> writes:
>
>> On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 09:43:22AM +0100, Andrew Walrond wrote:
>>> So, a quick google reveals VM as the front runner for email. Am I right?
>>> Any gotchas or missing features to be aware of?
>
> A missing feature: somebody told me it's not being maintained.
>
Then they were wrong. It is being actively maintained. In fact, it is
seeing a bit of revitalisation as some nice new features are being added. 

The new maintainer is Robert Widhopf-Fenk. See
http://www.nongnu.org/viewmail/ for more details.


> A gotcha: convert once locked up my computer completely while trying
> to view a mail with attachments.
>

There were some issues with the mime converters, particularly under Debian
for some reason, that would see load go through the roof and your system
become non-responsive. the solution is to use the perl modules  to do the
mime conversion stuff rather than the old mime decoders that come with VM. 

> VM was great with XEmacs, when I switched to Emacs, everything went
> all screwy.
>

Not sure what the issue would have been there. I've never run XEmacs and
have had no other problems other than the one mentioned above and a problem
with accessing attachments in messages composed with Apple Mail. both
problems are now resolved. Robert has improved the MIME stuff and is
working to clean up the code base and add new features (many of the ones
which use to be in his 'vmrfaddons' package are now part of the latest
version. 

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Dmitri Minaev]

On 10/6/07, Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net> wrote:
> No, rmail, Gnus, Mew and Wanderlust are also all well used.  I chose
> Gnus, personally, but you should review the range before selecting the
> tool that best meets your needs.

Could anyone, please, compare them IMAP-wise? I mean, disconnected
mode, fetching separate MIME parts, etc. Thank you.

-- 
With best regards,
Dmitri Minaev

Russian history blog: http://minaev.blogspot.com

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Daniel Pittman]

"Dmitri Minaev" <minaev@gmail.com> writes:
> On 10/6/07, Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net> wrote:
>> No, rmail, Gnus, Mew and Wanderlust are also all well used.  I chose
>> Gnus, personally, but you should review the range before selecting the
>> tool that best meets your needs.
>
> Could anyone, please, compare them IMAP-wise? 

No, but I can help on the Gnus front:

> I mean, disconnected mode, fetching separate MIME parts, etc. 

Gnus agent supports disconnected operation but is very slow, even
compared to other poorly performing options.

Gnus only supports fetching entire articles, not parts.

Gnus, through NNIR, does integrate IMAP searching; it also uses the
expunge model correctly.

In general it is tolerable but far from perfect.  I do, however, use it
in IMAP mode to handle my mail on a full time basis with no significant
issues.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
Daniel Pittman <daniel@cybersource.com.au>           Phone: 03 9621 2377
Level 4, 10 Queen St, Melbourne             Web: http://www.cyber.com.au
Cybersource: Australia's Leading Linux and Open Source Solutions Company

Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Dmitri Minaev]

On 10/10/07, Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net> wrote:

> Gnus agent supports disconnected operation but is very slow, even
> compared to other poorly performing options.
>
> Gnus only supports fetching entire articles, not parts.

Thank you. It seems like Gnus wouldn't be a good choice for a frequent
GPRS user, like me...

-- 
With best regards,
Dmitri Minaev

Russian history blog: http://minaev.blogspot.com