Re: Org mode and emacs email

[Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com>]

Simon Brown <simon@cliffestones.demon.co.uk> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I currently use mutt as my email client but I'm looking for greater
> emacs integration and better html support. Org mode supports at least
> gnus, vm and wanderlust. Can anybody advise on the relative pros and
> cons? My main restriction is that I don't want to break my mutt setup,
> so the client must be able to work with my current collection of mbox
> files. I also have 3 IMAP accounts. Using emacs 23 and current org-mode.
>
> Simon

This is pretty "fanboi" of me but its really simple : use Gnus. It can
do imap fine (you can always move to using a local dovecot
server and use offlineimap to sync if performance is a problem).

While I personally detest html email of any kind I understand that we
need to, at least, receive it ;) Gnus does that nicely with w3m
rendering if necessary.

I use maildir : you could always (should you want of course) simply move
all messages from an mbox group to a maildir inside gnus. While I cant
attest to Gnus and mbox, the documentation indicates full support.

Mairix also works well in gnus for fast indexed mail search.

The only thing I would say is that Gnus  can be quite daunting to start
with but if you're familiar with Emacs and Elisp then there's nothing
insurmountable and its a question of getting the basics right at the
start. It also has quite amazingly (complex!) powerful spam handling
which I finally got working only recently...

Nothing really "relative" there but my gut feeling is that the other
clients are pretty minimally supported these days and not in the same
league regarding general functionality but obviously have their own
strengths - Wanderlust in particular has far better Imap support I am
told. But the person who told me that also claimed that Gnus could not
do IMAP which is not correct.

Gnus also works well with things like gpg-agent and gnupgp for reading of encrypted
files. e.g My local imap connection

,----
|        (add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods 
|            '(nnimap "mymail"
|            (nnimap-stream network)
|            (nnimap-address "offlineimap")
|            (nnimap-authinfo-file "~/.authinfo.gpg")
|            (nnir-search-engine imap)))
`----

Feel free to drop me a line when you get started if you need a shove.

Oh ...  And it reads News ....