Re: Anyone gone from mutt to Emacs? was: Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Richard Riley]

Jonathan Groll <lists@groll.co.za> writes:

> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 02:11:07AM +0000, David Combs wrote:
>>A top-post: Here, someone went from Thunderbird (gui, etc)
>>to emacs, showing what he had to do to succeed.
>>(I include it all this once, so if expired for you, is
>>newified again.)
>>
>>Question: I use mutt on my isp-shell-account, and like it,
>>and use .1% of its capability (I think, so powerful is it).
>>Has anyone switched from mutt to emacs (temporarily or not)?
>>Comments?
>
> Like you I'm a mutt user who looks longingly into gnus-land but don't
> know if I have the energy to make the transition.
>
> Even after setting up a basic .gnus so that I could see the mails on
> my local IMAP server, I still had to stumble my way along. Pressing ^
> to subscribe to my local IMAP 'newsgroups' was not intuitive.

Lack of menus or useful menus is often an emacs issue for some : but in
this case the Gnus menu has an "enter servers" entry with "^" as the
key.

>
> Before it'll be much use to me, I realised I still need to figure out
> how to:
> (0) Work out how to NOT have to subscribe to my inbox every time I
> start gnus!

Auto saves here. I dont know off hand if I enabled it. I turned off
saving the .newsrc file however to speed things
up. (gnus-save-newsrc-file),

> (1) Configure my summary INBOX buffer so that it shows the columns I
> want and is sorted like I want

It can be a difficulty I agree. But there are examples in googleland and
the manual.

> (2) Get BBDB address completion working

Hmmm. Just works here. Did you (bbdb-insinuate-gnus) ?

> (3) Do something about mail indexing

I used to use Mairix and recently moved to dovecots own indexing
method. I have a key bound to gnus-group-make-nnir-group to search the
index. The index is automatically created by dovecot in my case.

> (4) Work out how to read HTML mails that people send me with w3m

There are plenty of examples of this in google land and in the manual
but it can be quite daunting at first sight I agree!

The relevant entries for me are, I think :

       ;; Use emacs-w3m to render html mails and display images
       mm-text-html-renderer 'w3m
       mm-inline-text-html-with-images t
       mm-inline-large-images t
       mm-verify-option 'always
       mm-decrypt-option nil
       mm-discouraged-alternatives '("text/html" "text/richtext")
       mm-automatic-display '("text/html")
       mm-attachment-override-types '("image/.*")
       mm-external-terminal-program (quote urxvt)
       gnus-ignored-mime-types '("text/x-vcard")
       w3m-key-binding 'info
       w3m-cookie-accept-bad-cookies (quote ask)
       w3m-use-cookies t
       w3m-safe-url-regexp nil
       mm-w3m-safe-url-regexp nil

>
> None of these problems are on their own insurmountable, it just
> requires a lot of energy, and from where I stand doesn't offer me
> convincing benefits over using mutt with emacs 'set' as editor.

I decided to bite the bullet so that I could have all the other benefits
of emacs with email. Translations, tags, org-mode links, w3m, bookmarks
etc etc.

> I've put a lot of effort in over the last while getting mutt to work
> as I like it, and the increased benefits of using GNUs may not be
> worth the pain involved in getting there. Or maybe they do?

I think it depends how much time you spend in emacs. I tend to live in
it so it was worth the effort. I used Mutt for a while and liked it too.

If it's any help and you feel like experimenting, my somewhat messy
gnus file is here:-

http://richardriley.net/projects/emacs/dotemacs#sec-2

And I admit its a bit of a mess and quite daunting. I need to prune it.

regards

r.