Re: Emacs for email: Rmail v VM v Gnus

[Filipp Gunbin]

Hi James, 

James Freer <jessejazza@gmail.com> writes:
> Hi Filipp
>
> I much appreciated your reply but i'm still struggling with some
> basics hence why i haven't replied earlier. Reading the emacs.pdf i am
> hoping to set up Rmail 'remotely' - that is [as i understand it like i
> have Alpine... using imap i am just using the email client to 'look'
> straight at the server without downloading headers or the entire
> message - use two machines so downloading mail doesn't seem the right
> approach. Basically avoiding the adverts from the webmail interface
> and hopefully a little customising to my liking and having a full
> screen for reading mail. I hope to use the trmail [thread messages]
> programme listed on Emacswiki.

Rmail cannot do that, at least in Emacs 23.4 which I'm using.

If you want direct IMAP access, you can use any of the other, more
advanced, email clients for Emacs (I tried only Gnus and it worked well,
as I've written).

The reason why I use email downloading is that I like to think about the
mailbox as about the real-world mailbox, where you receive your letters,
take them out immediately as you check it and never store there
again. You can archive them in some other place, or just take all the
needed information and throw away. Rmail allows to archive messages
conveniently (see "(emacs) Rmail Files" and "(emacs) Rmail Output" info
nodes).

BTW, why reading a pdf when you have info in emacs? C-h i g (emacs) Rmail RET
will give you the right info node.

>> I recently tried Rmail and it turned out that it is what I want. I was a
>> Gnus user for some time (and still use it for reading news) - it is
>> actually not hard at all to setup it for imap (just remember to use
>> secondary select methods for everything!). But Rmail is much more
>> convenient for me.
>
> what do you mean with 'secondary select methods for everything'

In Gnus, you can configure one primary select method and any number of
secondary select methods. They differ in the way you work with them, but
both select some messages from some place (this is defined by the
backend). For me it was unclear what the difference is, so I configured
my IMAP servers and NNTP servers as separate secondary select methods,
without using the primary.

>
>> I use fetchmail to get mail from my IMAP server (I like keeping
>> everything local because of access speed and because this way I have a
>> single place of storage even with multiple remote accounts). My
>> ~/.fetchmailrc looks like this:
>
> Exim is listed as a dependency with mailutils, can that be used?

I didn't work with it. I'm working on Cygwin, and the best tools
available here are, afaik, fetchmail + procmail, which I'm using now
(for example, last time I checked, the maildrop was not available).

-- 
Filipp Gunbin