Re: Emacs for mail: VM - WL - GNUS

[Xavier Maillard <xavier@maillard.im>]

Hi,

[ sending it again since I can't see it ]

On Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:29:25 +0100, Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz> wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Nov 2010, James Freer wrote:
> > I'm just starting to use emacs for editing and thought about using it
> > for email as well. I'm a moderator for several groups and have found
> > Thunderbird a bit slow. I'm hoping that a text email may be quicker. I
> > tried Cone and Mutt a while ago. I need to use imap and was wondering
> > if i'd be better off with emacs addons.
> > 
> > What are folk using WL or VM? I've read the gnus pdf and i think i'd
> > be better off with one of those two.
> > 
> > As for installing:
> > WL seems ok to follow
> > http://box.matto.nl/emacsgmail.html
> > 
> > VM i find a little heavy! for my knowledge - is there another site
> > which is easier to follow for a newbie
> > http://www.wonderworks.com/vm/user-manual/vm_2.html#SEC5
> > http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ViewMailAndImap
> 
> You may also try http://notmuchmail.org/. It is a search-based email
> client with Emacs UI. It is relatively young, but already very usable.
> If you need IMAP, you will probably want to combine it with offlineimap
> (https://github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap/wiki).

+1 for notmuchmail which is just awesome.

Why ? No time wasted in tweaking the system -i.e. your setup -, it has
an awesome GNU Emacs cli, bindings if you need to script something in
python, haskell, ... Plus it is extra fast, after all it is just a
mailstore !

In the past, I spent many hours configuring gnus/wl/your MUA here/ to
make it works like I wanted. In the end it was just a (bad) fork of the
original and I was not reading my e-mails (my .gnus file was 23k
lines...) ;)

rmail has been my best companion for years: basic features, simple to
setup (m-x rmail), simple to use. Just worked like a charm no useless
things (but no MIME support and no IMAP). Sadly I changed from POP to
IMAP and thus just had to give up my old good and lovely friend, sadly
:( Without this switch, I would have probably sticked with it.

I love simplicity and notmuchmail permits that :)

/Xavier