Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?

[Peter Davis]

Scott Randby <address@hidden> writes:

> On 08/11/2015 08:23 AM, Peter Davis wrote:
>>
>> 2) I need a decent editor for replies. I have not found a
>> browser-based client that has this.
>
> For me, setting up any of the Emacs email clients to work properly
> with my various email tasks is a daunting task. This especially true
> for my work email account which is not a Gmail account. I simply don't
> have the technical knowledge to get everything working, and I don't
> have the time to acquire that technical knowledge.

This has certainly been the case for me with gnus. I spent years (literally) 
playing with gnus and giving up, only to be drawn back
to it weeks, months or years later to try again. Seriously, it was only after 
years of this that I managed to get things working
well enough to actually use gnus, and even at that I only use it with IMAP.

FWIW, I also used VM for a while (easier to configure, but much less powerful), 
MH-E, Wanderlust as well as non-Emacs clients
(Sylpheed, mutt, Thunderbird, and others.) It's a crowded field. I generally 
liked some things about each of these, and disliked
others. There's no perfect solution.

One of the persistent frustrations for me with Thunderbird is that it still, 
even years after the problem was reported, can't get
the unread counts correct for various folders all the time. It frequently shows 
unread counts for folders that have no unread
messages, and vice versa.

I get hundreds of messages a day, so I like to just be able to plow through 
them quickly, replying as needed, flagging some for
later attention, etc. Mutt was actually the fastest for that, but I hate the 
way it displays HTML messages with w3m in dump
mode. Mutt is also pretty challenging to configure, and that has to be 
re-created for each new machine. With gnus, I just copy my
.gnus.el file over and, bam, done.

-pd