Re: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar

[Jeff Clough]

From: Andreas Politz <politza@fh-trier.de>
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:12:36 +0200

> Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> On Oct 12, 2:56 pm, Richard Riley <rileyrg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I think it is worth it because of the benefits of it being cradled by
>>> mother Emacs : having all my normal text tools for translation,
>>> spelling, searching etc in my gnus buffers is just too cool. It all
>>> works together too well. I do remember being frustrated earlier because
>>> of the incomprehensible manual and the raft of options (and being newish
>>> to emacs). But it was worth it.
>>
>> But you probably get the same benefits with Mew...

Every Emacs feature I've wanted and tried to use works very well with
Mew, or at least no worse than to be expected under Windows.

> So what is your experience with Mew concerning ease of setup, huge mail
> boxes, message threading and general performance ?

Setting up Mew was several orders of magnitude easier than setting up
Gnus, which I was never able to successfully do.  A good part of this
is that the Mew folks know something about documentation.  Another
part of this is that they seem to have spent less time creating a
one-size-fits-all "messaging" solution and concentrated on making a
good MUA.  There's news stuff in Mew, from what I've read, but it
doesn't seem to have affected how *mail* is treated.

I'll skip down to message threading because that's the easy one: I
don't use message threading in email and never have in any MUA.

Mew handles huge mailboxes both incredibly well and hideously.  If you
use the default configuration, a mailbox is nothing more than a
directory on the disk with each message sitting in it's own text file
(this appears to be your standard ASCII affair with anything else
MIME'd up, but I don't receive messages in multi-byte formats so I
don't know for sure how those would be handled).

When you visit a folder, Mew creates a summary file in the appropriate
directory and displays a list of the messages in that folder to the
user.  If the summary file for the folder is current, visiting that
folder, even for the first time that Emacs session, takes no
observable time for a folder with about 1,000 messages in it.  I
assume the "right" answer here is that it takes as long as is required
for Mew to open the summary file and dump it to the screen.  The
summary file is text, with one line per message, although these lines
do need to be parsed to display the information to the user the way
the user has Mew configured.

Where Mew fails hard is in when it choses to generate those summary
files.  If you are merrily filing messages into a folder from your
Inbox or some other location, they don't ever show up in that summary
file until you visit that folder in Mew.  Then Mew sees the summary
data is out of date, throws it away and rebuilds the entire file
again.  Even for 1,000 messages this means that it will take a while.

Now granted, Mew's one saving grace here is that it isn't catatonic
while this happens.  You can still use Mew, Emacs as a whole *and* any
messages that have been summarized in that folder already.  The issue
is that you don't have access to all of the messages until the summary
file has been rebuilt.  And in the default configuration, with one
message per file, that's a *lot* of expensive disk I/O.

It's on my perpetual to-do list to fiddle around with idle timers and
see if I can't make Mew do this re-summarizing lazily in the
background so I can dodge this issue, but I'm not holding my breath
that I'll ever get around to it.

As for overall performance, I'm very happy with it.  It's leaps and
bounds faster than Thunderbird and I can work much more efficiently
having access to the rest of Emacs in the same environment.

It's certainly not a perfect piece of software, but that I could get
it to work *at all* is a pretty good feature and makes it immediately
better than Gnus for me.

Jeff



----------
Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/