Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> I'm pretty sure you've decided this is a religious issue at this
> point, so it's unlikely I'm going to pursue the conversation beyond
> this message.  You like Gnus, I don't.  Fair enough.

All I will say in response is that Richard's posts have been a model of
politeness and restraint.

>>> It's not wrong to compare what I know about Gnus to what I know
>>> about Mew.
>> 
>> That is true Jeff. But you didn't do that. You said you never got
>> Gnus working. Which is a different thing. I think its hard to be
>> objective about a MUA if you didn't actually use it as one. Or am I
>> mistaken in your meaning?
>
> My answer to this was (and is) below.
>
>>>
>>> Where the Gnus documentation exists, it's awful.  This is in direct
>>> contrast of Mew, where I was able to look at one page of text, follow
>>> a handful of steps and have a working MUA in less than an hour.

I believe that all Richard was saying is that this is a subjective
judgment. As a point of comparison, when I tried setting up an emacs
email client a year ago, I spent a couple of days trying to get Mew to
work, whereas I had Gnus accessing my IMAP folders in just a few
minutes.

But I would by no means conclude from this experience that Mew is not a
superb email client. It would be much safer to attribute the problems to
my own misunderstanding and/or shortcomings.

> How many hours of frustration should a user be expected to endure in
> order to run a piece of software to solve the problem of reading
> email?  Mind you, I'm not talking about hours spent learning how to
> *use* the software, I'm talking about hours spent just getting it to
> work *at all*.

I'm sorry to hear that was your experience. It was not mine. But instead
of simply dismissing Gnus, it would be helpful if you offered specifics.
What in particular was difficult? Getting the mail? Reading the mail?

>> In short my email set up talks to an impa server, drags all emails
>> in, splits them into different folders, I then use different smtp
>> servers for sending depending on the posting style employed by that
>> particular group. It all works very, very fast, efficiently and
>> reliably with excellent customisation facilities. No. It's not
>> "crap".
>
> So Gnus isn't crap as a *client* because you can do everything you
> want by running multiple *servers*!?! I'm sorry, but in my world
> "become a sysadmin for a handful of servers" is in no way a reasonable
> solution to "i'd like to read my email now".

I don't think Richard was talking about running his own servers here
(though you can do that if you want, of course). Rather, he's simply
saying that Gnus can relay mail via different smtp servers depending on
what group one is in.

- Matt