Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> From: Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:58:39 +0200
>
>>> Setting up Mew was several orders of magnitude easier than setting up
>>> Gnus, which I was never able to successfully do.  A good part of this
>> 
>> What part were you unable to do? Did you have it reading mail at all?
>
> I'm tempted to go into specifics, but I'll resist.  I see a lot of

Why not? If you mention specifics that did not work maybe I or others
might help?

> your response is of the "Gnus is great" variety, so you've obviously

No. My response was of the form "well, you mention this in Mews and,
well, Gnus can do that too". There is a big difference between that and
"Mews sucks and Gnus rocks" :-)

> had some good experiences.  I didn't.  Maybe if the documentation was
> better I'd be using Gnus today instead of Mew.

I got most of my config from a mixture of howtos and the manual.

>
>> It's a shame you could not get Gnus to work. There must be something
>> subtle you missed. But since you could not get it to work, it's wrong to
>> suggest Mews handling is better in any way. I couldn't really see
>> anything in what you said that suggests, in any shape or form, that Mews
>> is a better emacs MUA than Gnus. But if Mews works for you thats great.
>
> 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?

>
> 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.
>
> Gnus also brags about the fact that all messages are treated the same,

Brags?

> without regard to where they came from.  While this is *technically*

And also not true. Using splitting on the gnus client side or
subscribing to different maildirs via imap for example different
messages can go to different folders all with their own customised
handling/presentation/posting style.

> true, a more accurate statement is that it treats all messages like
> news and all folders like newsgroups.  I just don't work that way.

In what way? My email folders feel like email folders to me. New emails
appear, I read them and then archive them or delete them.

> Maybe, as with all "paradigm-ware", once you get used to how Gnus does
> things it all makes sense and makes my productivity rocket skyward,
> but it's more important to me that I'm reading my mail *today* in a
> way that makes sense to me *now*.

As I do.I think the issue would clearer if we new what it is you
couldn't get working. Nothing in emacs is "really out of the box simple"
IMO :-;

>
> These might not be points in the "Ways Mew is better than Gnus" column
> for you, but they are for me.  Call me old-fashioned, but not getting
> a piece of software to work at all after an hour of dicking with it,
> nor seeing any real progress toward making it work, is more than
> enough reason to call it crap.

It's certainly not "crap". But if you don't have the patience or the
desire to pursue it and you're happy with Mew, then enjoy - it's still
a great email client I am sure hosted by emacs.

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".