Re: Handling mail

[Johan Vromans <jvromans@squirrel.nl>]

Thanks for your replies.

> What do you think is the option and what is lacking in emacs mail
> clients?

I think my major problem is history. In 25 years many things have
evolved (changed) in the world of Mail and News, and my setups contain
many quirks to work around limitations that may not exists anymore. I
was an early adopter of MIME, non-ASCII display, GUI Emacs (Epoch) and
Unicode (Mule). The setups may have reached the point of becoming
inconsistent.

The problems that I actually experience during daily use is:

- No proper display if Unicode characters (Emacs and Gnus do this right,
  VM doesn't).

- Mysterious handling of message attachments (some are displayed inline,
  some are displatched to external 'viewers', but most are offered to be
  saved to disk). This may be a problem external to Emacs.

> Gnus and BBDB have active development. 

Gnus, yes. But BBDB?

  "BBDB 2.35 is the current stable released version, released on 
  January 30, 2007."

Seems rather old to me...

>> Gnus seems to be the only package that is up-to-date (I use it for
>> reading news and mailing lists), however I've never been able to live
>> with it as a news reader.

[this should have read "with it as a mail reader"]

I treat mail and news as two different sources of information.

For news (and, in my case, mailing lists) I read what's new and
interesting, then all's gone (gnus-summary-catchup-and exit) unless I
explicitly mark articles to keep.

For mail, every message stays in my mailbox until I explicitly file or
delete it. When I tried Gnus to read mail (years ago) I couldn't get it
to just leave the messages. After reading a message it must be kept
explictly otherwise it's gone.

Moreover, VM provides some nifty features that I haven't yet found out
how to do with Gnus:

- Automatically infer the name of the file to save a message into,
  depending on the sender name (and using the mail-folder property in
  the BBDB, if any).

- In the summary, display the name of the recipient if the sender is me
  ('me' being a list of mail addresses). This is particularly handy
  since I save BCC's of outgoing messages in my primary mailbox.

- Automatically (or on demand) change my from, reply-to, selected
  headers and signature depending on which of my email addresses the
  message was sent to.

> I'd suggest you give it a go. Basically, if you want control over your
> computer usage and information flow and are willing to configure usage
> to your needs, there's no real option (or?).

I guess I have to bite the bullit and throw away my VM and Gnus config
and start from scratch, using the features that are available now.

Not an easy task, though...

-- Johan