Re: Emacs for email: Rmail v VM v Gnus

[chad]

On 4 July 2012 02:35, John Wiegley <johnw <at> newartisans.com> wrote:
>>>>>> James Freer <jessejazza <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>> But reading the info i've got a bit confused - one place it says use
>> MailMode and another use Fetchmail and Sendmail [also one's got Postfix,
>> Exim, Courier to choose from]. What is best?
>
> I use this:
>
>
>     Gmail -> Fetchmail -> Procmail -> SIEVE -> Dovecot (mdbox store)
>
>     Gnus
>
>     Postfix -> Gmail


I used to use something similar, but with rmail in the middle rather
than Gnus (For James, the first part is for gathering mail from the
servers, the middle is for reading it, and the last is for sending it.
These particular pieces work together but are independent and
exchangeable.) I switched to MH for a while, and then moved to a
`fancy' client with graphical display and automatic spam sorting when
I left the hacker/programmer/sysadmin game (and cut my daily email
influx by a few thousand messages).

If you want to use emacs and keep your mail on the server, you
probably want to look into Wanderlust. Gnus can do it also (the things
Gnus *can't* do form a frighteningly small list), but it sounds like
you've already looked into the beast and decided to hold off.

If you don't mind moving to keep your email locally, your options
expand quite a bit. In addition to Gnus, you can try rmail, mh-e, and
VM. There are upsides and downsides to each approach, which we could
discuss, but it sounds like you're pretty sure you want to keep
everything on the server.

(For what it's worth: Gnus has sub-bell assemblies on its recursive
whistles. Rmail is extremely simple, but has trouble with lots of mail
(in my experience). MH-e lets you use nmh, keeping your mail local in
an extremely flexible one-message-per-file structure. I never used
VM.)

I hope that helps,
*Chad