Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Bastien]

Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com> writes:

> I've looked at Gnus.  It uses the "paradigm" of newsgroups for
> everything.  I'd rather not have to retrain my brain for something as
> trivial as reading email, but let's just say I'm willing.  Is there a
> way to see "I do not have an NNTP server, so please don't bother me
> about it anymore"?  It looks like I can set a variable so that gnus will
> ignore the email side of things, but I can't find something similar for
> news.

;; Don't use nntp at all
(setq gnus-select-method '(nnnil))

;; Use nnml to read email
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnml "")))

;; Fetch emails from the mail pool
(setq mail-sources '((file :path "/var/mail/guerry"))

> I've also taken a glance at VM and would like to go further, but I see
> no direct evidence that it works with Emacs 22.x.  Is anyone using VM
> with a recent Emacs on Windows XP?

Make sure you also have a look at Mew: http://www.mew.org

> Before anyone seriously suggests moving to linux as a solution to my
> problem (which seems dangerously near), let me just clarify something.
> I'm well aware of my options in that regard and am very familiar with
> all things *nixen.  Switching from Windows XP to *nix for email is not
> going to happen.  Not at all.  And I'm not interested in explaining why
> I won't or listening to why I should.

(That sounds a bit angry, no?)

> Installing, configuring and maintaining an IMAP server in order to read
> and search my mail is also not going to happen.  An ancient version of
> Eudora on my dad's old Mac LC could let me read my mail, *and* find my
> messages, without having to run such a thing.  And it did it for
> thousands of messages without flinching.  If a piece of software here in
> the modern world can't handle it, the answer is to not use that
> software.

(That sounds a bit angry too, no?)

> I prefer my mail to always be in bsd mbox files because that's still
> what 90% of the world expects your mail to be in, can be manipulated by
> any code that operates on text files and doesn't break when I move from
> OS to OS.  And speed shouldn't be a factor when your mua does proper
> indexing.

You sound a bit fussy about all those things.  

While your arguments might be very right to you, you'll certainly get
more helpful answers with a more open-minded attitude.

-- 
 Bastien