Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com>]

On Sep 9, 4:55 am, Bastien <bastiengue...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Jeff Clough <j...@chaosphere.com> writes:
> > Okay, so I'm seriously considering switching from Thunderbird to Emacs
> > (under Windows XP) for my mail and calendar needs, but I haven't used
> > Emacs for either of these purposes in so long I don't know if it's
> > feasible, nor am I certain which modes are "best".  I'm hoping that some
> > of you can point me in the right direction.  I'd "just do it" as a test,
> > but I'd rather not go through a crap ton of hassle and problems only to
> > hear later "You should not have used foo mode for that, bar mode is what
> > you want".
>
> Check Gnus and Org.
>
> http://gnus.org/manual.htmlhttp://orgmode.org/
>
> > 1.  It needs to work on Windows XP without having to install a
> > unix/posix environment like Cygwin.  I *am* willing to install discrete
> > utilities if necessary (if Emacs doesn't do POP on its own and needs
> > some external program to do it, for instance).
>
> AFAIK Emacs + Gnus works fine under Windows.
>
> > 2.  I have just under seven thousand messages in various folders (mbox
> > files) that I'll be wanting to keep, so it needs to not choke and die
> > when confronted with "many" messages.
>
> It's okay.  
>

Well, what do you mean by 'okay' ?

Opening huge groups (> 1000 articles) is just slow with Gnus, really.
Fetching the headers, sorting and displaying the articles by using the
thread view. takes years. It's like Gnus is using some O(n2) algos.

Doing the same thing with thunderbird is incredibly faster.

Another important drawback, is that since gnus is written in elisp, it
doesn't have any multithread support in it. So if you're doing some
actions that take a while (and there are, news/mail server can  be
slow), the whole emacs process (where gnus is running) is just stuck.

Don't get me wrong, I use GNUS (maybe because I spent so much time in
it, I don't want to admit I was wrong ;) but you must be ready to
spent some time to configure it and to adopt it and I'm wondering if
it really worth the trouble specially if the OP is not interested in
news group...