Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough]

Okay, I've looked at Gnus, as well as VM and have some questions.  I'm 
also having a weird problem in trying just to send mail from Emacs.  See 
below if you'd like to know more and think you can help out.  I'm still 
looking for any other packages people actually use for email in emacs 
under windows so don't be shy!  On the calendar front, I'll be giving 
org-mode the once over later today.

Thanks!

Jeff

P.S.

Gnus

I've looked at Gnus.  It uses the "paradigm" of newsgroups for 
everything.  I'd rather not have to retrain my brain for something as 
trivial as reading email, but let's just say I'm willing.  Is there a 
way to see "I do not have an NNTP server, so please don't bother me 
about it anymore"?  It looks like I can set a variable so that gnus will 
ignore the email side of things, but I can't find something similar for 
news.

VM

I've also taken a glance at VM and would like to go further, but I see 
no direct evidence that it works with Emacs 22.x.  Is anyone using VM 
with a recent Emacs on Windows XP?

Sending Mail

In the process of all this looking, I decided to try to get *sending* 
mail to work.  I hear tell from this faq 
(http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/Network-access.html) that 
emacs can "talk directly to SMTP mail servers" via smtpmail.el.  I 
stuffed the following in my .emacs:

(setq user-full-name "Your full name")
(setq user-mail-address "Your@email.address")
(setq smtpmail-default-smtp-server "domain.name.of.your.smtp.server")
    
(setq send-mail-command 'smtpmail-send-it) ; For mail-mode (Rmail)


Did C-x m, wrote stuff, did C-c C-c and promptly got a Thunderbird 
window popping up the message (well, actually it told me to paste the 
message in because the text had been conveniently dropped on my 
clipboard, thankfully obliterating what was there before).  Is there a 
way to stop this from happening and for Emacs to just send it itself?  
"Talk directly to SMTP mail servers" doesn't mean "Fire up another 
application" in my opinion.

Still looking for suggestions/experiences with other mail packages, and 
am planning to give org-mode the once over later today.  Thanks for 
getting me pointed in the right direction!

P.P.S.

Before anyone seriously suggests moving to linux as a solution to my 
problem (which seems dangerously near), let me just clarify something.  
I'm well aware of my options in that regard and am very familiar with 
all things *nixen.  Switching from Windows XP to *nix for email is not 
going to happen.  Not at all.  And I'm not interested in explaining why 
I won't or listening to why I should.

Installing, configuring and maintaining an IMAP server in order to read 
and search my mail is also not going to happen.  An ancient version of 
Eudora on my dad's old Mac LC could let me read my mail, *and* find my 
messages, without having to run such a thing.  And it did it for 
thousands of messages without flinching.  If a piece of software here in 
the modern world can't handle it, the answer is to not use that software.

I prefer my mail to always be in bsd mbox files because that's still 
what 90% of the world expects your mail to be in, can be manipulated by 
any code that operates on text files and doesn't break when I move from 
OS to OS.  And speed shouldn't be a factor when your mua does proper 
indexing.


--

Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/