Re: starting an external command from emacs

[Dan Espen]

Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> writes:

> On Wed, 2008-11-12 at 18:08 -0500, Dan Espen wrote:
>> Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> writes:
...
>> Have you looked at VM, MH-E, rmail, GNUS?
>> (Existing Emacs mail interfaces.)
>
> hi dan,
>
> i did look briefly at all of these, but two issues for me:
>
> - all of them feel a little daunting 

I find MH-E to be very simple.
The way mh keeps each email in a separate file is a bonus.

I've configured mh-e to use lynx to convert all the HTML email
I get to plain text which helps being able to copy paste plain text.

VM looks to me like it's better supported with more features but I've
never tried it.

GNUS strays from a traditional interface (IMO) so I've never gotten
comfortable with it.

> - one of my problems right now is that my contacts info is spread out in
> far too many places already -- mutt, evolution, and gmail, not to

MH-E provides tab completion for mh aliases.
If you take your database and put it in .mh_aliases in this format:

user_name1: email_addr1
user_name2: email_addr2

you can start typing the user_name, hit tab and see the completions.