Re: Handling mail

[Richard Riley]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> On Thu, Jul 14 2011, Johan Vromans wrote:
>
>> After having used GNU/Emacs+VM for 20-odd years I wonder: is it still
>> viable to use Emacs to handle modern mail?
>>
>> Most mail and mail-related packages (e.g. VM, BBDB, MailCrypt, WL)
>> seem to be outdated and unmaintained for years. Many problems exist
>> with multi-media mail, Unicode, and so on.
>>
>> Gnus seems to be the only package that is up-to-date (I use it for
>> reading news and mailing lists), however I've never been able to live
>> with it as a news reader. I'm very hooked to VM's virtual folders.
>> My dearest wish is to continue using Emacs for mail but currently this
>> feels like a dead end.
>>
>> What are your ideas and suggestions?
>>
>> -- Johan
>
> Try gnus, as others have said, and also BBDB is under fairly active
> development -- version 3 is underway. Some people have virulent
> reactions against it, but they must have some use-cases that I don't,
> because I've found it to work very well.

+1 on BBDB 3 - but do read the release notes and google. It will
probably bomb out rapidly when you first try it but a google or two
later and it'll work fine in most cases I suspect. I recall having to
make some changes with alias handling and expanding for mail lists but
that was about it (and this primarily because of function name changes).