Re: Emacs for email: Rmail v VM v Gnus

[James Freer]

On 13 July 2012 01:06, chad <yandros@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4 July 2012 02:35, John Wiegley <johnw <at> newartisans.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> James Freer <jessejazza <at> gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> But reading the info i've got a bit confused - one place it says use
>>> MailMode and another use Fetchmail and Sendmail [also one's got Postfix,
>>> Exim, Courier to choose from]. What is best?
>>
>> I use this:
>>
>>
>>     Gmail -> Fetchmail -> Procmail -> SIEVE -> Dovecot (mdbox store)
>>
>>     Gnus
>>
>>     Postfix -> Gmail
>
>
> I used to use something similar, but with rmail in the middle rather
> than Gnus (For James, the first part is for gathering mail from the
> servers, the middle is for reading it, and the last is for sending it.
> These particular pieces work together but are independent and
> exchangeable.) I switched to MH for a while, and then moved to a
> `fancy' client with graphical display and automatic spam sorting when
> I left the hacker/programmer/sysadmin game (and cut my daily email
> influx by a few thousand messages).
>
> If you want to use emacs and keep your mail on the server, you
> probably want to look into Wanderlust. Gnus can do it also (the things
> Gnus *can't* do form a frighteningly small list), but it sounds like
> you've already looked into the beast and decided to hold off.
>
> If you don't mind moving to keep your email locally, your options
> expand quite a bit. In addition to Gnus, you can try rmail, mh-e, and
> VM. There are upsides and downsides to each approach, which we could
> discuss, but it sounds like you're pretty sure you want to keep
> everything on the server.
>
> (For what it's worth: Gnus has sub-bell assemblies on its recursive
> whistles. Rmail is extremely simple, but has trouble with lots of mail
> (in my experience). MH-e lets you use nmh, keeping your mail local in
> an extremely flexible one-message-per-file structure. I never used
> VM.)
>
> I hope that helps,
> *Chad
>
>

I've been busy this past week on other things but in the evenings i
didn't get VM or Gnus to work. I wanted to try each of them and then
make a decision. I'm going to give it another go this w/e, carefully
go through the manual again and if i've missed something i'll ask for
help. As to which app i suppose i like to keep things simple and i
suppose i have a preference for using Gnus as that's what is shipped
with emacs [perhaps i'm just old fashioned!]. I use xubuntu as it does
lots of things simply but effectively e.g. Bulk rename for renaming
all those photos... i just love compared with Krename which has got
rather bloated and full of eye candy - gives you an idea of what i'm
like!

As for having mail locally or on the server - i belong to a lot of dog
groups, classic car and IT groups and thus most of the mail i like to
skim through - 'flag' things of interest and delete the rest. If one
uses POP i presume one uses quite a lot of broadband download
allowance on mail that one isn't going to keep. I have 5 email
addresses and using POP for my personal mail could be worth
considering. But i've used IMAP up till now saving important emails to
pdf as backup just in case they're lost on the server [not that that
has ever happened]. I thought that POP has rather been superseeded by
IMAP [providers like Yahoo only allow POP but i can't see why they
should have that policy]. I can see that POP is a choice for those
that want to save all business mail [or such like] on their hard
drive.

thanks
james