Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com>]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> Okay, I've looked at Gnus, as well as VM and have some questions.  I'm 
> also having a weird problem in trying just to send mail from Emacs.  See 
> below if you'd like to know more and think you can help out.  I'm still 
> looking for any other packages people actually use for email in emacs 
> under windows so don't be shy!  On the calendar front, I'll be giving 
> org-mode the once over later today.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Jeff
>
> P.S.
>
> Gnus
>
> I've looked at Gnus.  It uses the "paradigm" of newsgroups for 
> everything.  I'd rather not have to retrain my brain for something as 
> trivial as reading email, but let's just say I'm willing.  Is there a 

Theres nothing to retrain. You see a "group" and your email is in
there. No paradigm shift at all.

> way to see "I do not have an NNTP server, so please don't bother me 
> about it anymore"?  It looks like I can set a variable so that gnus will 
> ignore the email side of things, but I can't find something similar for 
> news.

Just dont subscribe to any news groups.

>
> VM
>
> I've also taken a glance at VM and would like to go further, but I see 
> no direct evidence that it works with Emacs 22.x.  Is anyone using VM 
> with a recent Emacs on Windows XP?
>
> Sending Mail
>
> In the process of all this looking, I decided to try to get *sending* 
> mail to work.  I hear tell from this faq 
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/Network-access.html) that 
> emacs can "talk directly to SMTP mail servers" via smtpmail.el.  I 
> stuffed the following in my .emacs:
>
> (setq user-full-name "Your full name")
> (setq user-mail-address "Your@email.address")
> (setq smtpmail-default-smtp-server "domain.name.of.your.smtp.server")
>      
> (setq send-mail-command 'smtpmail-send-it) ; For mail-mode (Rmail)
>
>
> Did C-x m, wrote stuff, did C-c C-c and promptly got a Thunderbird 
> window popping up the message (well, actually it told me to paste the 
> message in because the text had been conveniently dropped on my 
> clipboard, thankfully obliterating what was there before).  Is there a 
> way to stop this from happening and for Emacs to just send it itself?  
> "Talk directly to SMTP mail servers" doesn't mean "Fire up another 
> application" in my opinion.

Never heard of anything like that before. Emacs doesn't launch
thunderbird.

>
> Still looking for suggestions/experiences with other mail packages, and 
> am planning to give org-mode the once over later today.  Thanks for 
> getting me pointed in the right direction!
>
> P.P.S.

>
> Before anyone seriously suggests moving to linux as a solution to my 
> problem (which seems dangerously near), let me just clarify something.  
> I'm well aware of my options in that regard and am very familiar with 
> all things *nixen.  Switching from Windows XP to *nix for email is not 
> going to happen.  Not at all.  And I'm not interested in explaining why 
> I won't or listening to why I should.
>
> Installing, configuring and maintaining an IMAP server in order to read 
> and search my mail is also not going to happen.  An ancient version of 
> Eudora on my dad's old Mac LC could let me read my mail, *and* find my 
> messages, without having to run such a thing.  And it did it for 
> thousands of messages without flinching.  If a piece of software here in 
> the modern world can't handle it, the answer is to not use that
> software.

Gnus is possibly the most powerful email/usenet client out there. And
quite why you seem to think people would suggest you move to Linux for
your email client is rather baffling.
>
> I prefer my mail to always be in bsd mbox files because that's still 
> what 90% of the world expects your mail to be in, can be manipulated by 
> any code that operates on text files and doesn't break when I move from 
> OS to OS.  And speed shouldn't be a factor when your mua does proper 
> indexing.