Re: Emacs for email: Rmail v VM v Gnus

[James Freer]

On 13 July 2012 23:02, James Freer <jessejazza@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 13 July 2012 01:06, chad <yandros@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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
>>
>>
>
> I've been busy this past week on other things but in the evenings i
> didn't get VM or Gnus to work. I wanted to try each of them and then
> make a decision. I'm going to give it another go this w/e, carefully
> go through the manual again and if i've missed something i'll ask for
> help. As to which app i suppose i like to keep things simple and i
> suppose i have a preference for using Gnus as that's what is shipped
> with emacs [perhaps i'm just old fashioned!]. I use xubuntu as it does
> lots of things simply but effectively e.g. Bulk rename for renaming
> all those photos... i just love compared with Krename which has got
> rather bloated and full of eye candy - gives you an idea of what i'm
> like!
>
> As for having mail locally or on the server - i belong to a lot of dog
> groups, classic car and IT groups and thus most of the mail i like to
> skim through - 'flag' things of interest and delete the rest. If one
> uses POP i presume one uses quite a lot of broadband download
> allowance on mail that one isn't going to keep. I have 5 email
> addresses and using POP for my personal mail could be worth
> considering. But i've used IMAP up till now saving important emails to
> pdf as backup just in case they're lost on the server [not that that
> has ever happened]. I thought that POP has rather been superseeded by
> IMAP [providers like Yahoo only allow POP but i can't see why they
> should have that policy]. I can see that POP is a choice for those
> that want to save all business mail [or such like] on their hard
> drive.
>
> thanks
> james

Perhaps i should add - what is the best way to set up email for linux users?

If one is upgrading with the 6 month release or annually even
downloading the headers with IMAP on Thunderbird or Evolution takes a
good while. I think they are both so slow i don't want to bother.

By comparison with the GUI ones the text email clients download like
'lightning'. Alpine is the fastest i have used and i only use it
remotely so i don't even have to set it up... after installing Alpine
just copy over the passfile and pinerc. But Alpine doesn't do threads
very well and as i'm intending to use emacs from now on... one of its
email clients seems a logical approach.

james