Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[Sivaram Neelakantan]

Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> writes:


[...]

>
> The 'heavy weight' is Gnus. I've looked at it, but to be honest, it has a
> very very steep learning curve and will take a fair bit to configure. I use
> Gnus for reading newsgroups and it is excellent at that. It is probably OK
> for mail and lots of people love it, but I personally never felt
> comfortable with it and at times, it took a lot of work to find out how to
> do something which is normally fairly trivial. I also never got
> comfortable with the mail like newsgroups approach it uses. However, those
> who have put in the time and stuck with it will swear by it and are likely
> to sacrifice key family members rather than give it up. I don't know if
> this is because it is truely wonderful or if they feel they need to invest
> in it totally in order to justify the effort it takes to get it working
> just how you want. If you have unusual and extreme mail handling
> requirements, it is probably the best choice, but if your requirements are
> fairly standard, you may find it a lot of work for little obvious benefit. 
>


Sometimes in my saner moments, I do wonder why I use Gnus.  :-)

I can't recall why I decided on Gnus (now, living dangerously, on the
CVS version) but it worked the first time I tried.  One thing I
distinctly remember is, the effort to learn it.  Simple things to
me(coming from a clicky world) seems so difficult to do.  The
manual,ahh the manual is a thing of beauty;  It was incomprehensible
then and parts of it still are. :-)

I agree that if standard mail is all you want, then Gnus might not be
the one for use but on the other hand, if you think you might want a
lot of things that the mail client should automatically do, then Gnus
might be the best bet.
  
[...]



 sivaram
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