Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Tassilo Horn]

Bastien <bastienguerry@googlemail.com> writes:

Hi!

>> Okay, so I'm seriously considering switching from Thunderbird to Emacs
>> (under Windows XP) for my mail and calendar needs, but I haven't used
>> Emacs for either of these purposes in so long I don't know if it's
>> feasible, nor am I certain which modes are "best".  I'm hoping that some
>> of you can point me in the right direction.  I'd "just do it" as a test,
>> but I'd rather not go through a crap ton of hassle and problems only to
>> hear later "You should not have used foo mode for that, bar mode is what
>> you want".
>
> Check Gnus and Org.

Seconded.

>> 2.  I have just under seven thousand messages in various folders
>> (mbox files) that I'll be wanting to keep, so it needs to not choke
>> and die when confronted with "many" messages.
>
> It's okay.  

But I don't know if mbox is the best backend for huge mailboxes.  You
might want to consider installing a local IMAP server instead.

If that's not possible, maybe the nnml backend is the preferred
alternative for gnus.

>> 4.  Reading HTML messages should be possible, but my needs here are
>> minimal.  I'll settle for what Lynx looked like circa 1995.  I just
>> need the message to be legible.
>
> Gnus can be configured to read HTML messages.

Yes, especially if it can use the w3m text browser + emacs-w3m to render
the messages.  w3m would need to be installed separately, but I don't
know if it works on Windows.

>> 2.  The ability to search for messages and have the results be what I
>> want.  That means finding all the messages with my search string and
>> *not* finding messages that don't have my search string.  I thought
>> this is what "Search" implied, but Thunderbird has its own ideas.
>
> Maybe that's the hardest part of your request.
>
> Under GNU/Linux, mairix (http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/)
> makes it very easy to search and find messages and Gnus has an
> interface to it (http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_43.html#SEC43).
>
> But mairix requires Cygwin to run under Windows.

I store all my mails in a local IMAP server.  That server supports
indexing of mails, and using Gnus nnir backend I can quickly search for
mails.

Bye,
Tassilo