Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Bastien]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> Okay, so I'm seriously considering switching from Thunderbird to Emacs
> (under Windows XP) for my mail and calendar needs, but I haven't used
> Emacs for either of these purposes in so long I don't know if it's
> feasible, nor am I certain which modes are "best".  I'm hoping that some
> of you can point me in the right direction.  I'd "just do it" as a test,
> but I'd rather not go through a crap ton of hassle and problems only to
> hear later "You should not have used foo mode for that, bar mode is what
> you want".

Check Gnus and Org.

http://gnus.org/manual.html
http://orgmode.org/

> 1.  It needs to work on Windows XP without having to install a
> unix/posix environment like Cygwin.  I *am* willing to install discrete
> utilities if necessary (if Emacs doesn't do POP on its own and needs
> some external program to do it, for instance).

AFAIK Emacs + Gnus works fine under Windows.

> 2.  I have just under seven thousand messages in various folders (mbox
> files) that I'll be wanting to keep, so it needs to not choke and die
> when confronted with "many" messages.

It's okay.  

> 3.  I need to have my calendar appointments either in my face at all
> times (I can live with it being in a split window or a new frame I just
> leave open) or have the alarms/reminders be insistent and arbitrarily
> settable (remind me 15 minutes in advance for this appointment and 30
> minutes before this one).  I have a lot of appointments and a very bad
> memory for these sorts of things.

Org is the tool you want, it's highly configurable.

> 4.  Reading HTML messages should be possible, but my needs here are
> minimal.  I'll settle for what Lynx looked like circa 1995.  I just need
> the message to be legible.

Gnus can be configured to read HTML messages.

> The things I'm hoping to get from moving to Emacs:
>
> 1.  The ability to stay in Emacs for more of my tasks and use its
> editing commands which are now so ingrained into my hands there's no
> hope of going back.

You will enjoy more Emacs-power after the switch. 

> 2.  The ability to search for messages and have the results be what I
> want.  That means finding all the messages with my search string and
> *not* finding messages that don't have my search string.  I thought this
> is what "Search" implied, but Thunderbird has its own ideas.

Maybe that's the hardest part of your request.

Under GNU/Linux, mairix (http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/) makes
it very easy to search and find messages and Gnus has an interface to it
(http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_43.html#SEC43).  

But mairix requires Cygwin to run under Windows. 

You can also check Mew (http://www.mew.org) -- it's another mail reader
for Emacs, with many more integrated search facilities than Gnus.

> 3.  The ability to use the keyboard for marking messages as read,
> deleting messages, moving them around, etc.  A lot of this stuff is
> relegated to the mouse and switching from mouse to keyboard and back is
> getting really special annoying.

Gnus handles all this.

> Things I don't need:
>
> 1.  I don't use newsgroups or to-do lists.

Don't use these functions, then.

> 2.  I don't care about in-line attachments and would prefer not to see
> them anyway.  As long as I can pull them out of the message and save
> them somewhere sane, that works for me.

Same.

> 3.  Bonus points if I can diddle a link in an email message and have
> Emacs bring it up in Firefox, but I'm not married to it.

Feasible.

HTH,

-- 
 Bastien