Re: Emacs for email: Rmail v VM v Gnus

[Suvayu Ali]

Hi Gnus users,

On Sat, Aug 04, 2012 at 03:21:04PM -0400, Jeremiah Dodds wrote:
> Peter Münster <pmlists@free.fr> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, Aug 03 2012, James Freer wrote:
> >
> >> I just want something as easy as Thunderbird or similar to set up -
> >> just enter in the pop/imap and smtp bits... then use.
> >
> > No problem with Gnus: just accept the default settings.
> 
> Funnily enough, it took me a couple failed attempts and quite a bit of
> gathering emacs experience to be able to set up gnus (mostly for email)
> easily. When I did it, I was like "wait, that's all I needed to do? WTF
> was wrong with me before?" Of course, I couldn't remember wtf was wrong
> with me before.
> 
> That said, I'm not sure how gnus compares to GUI clients wrt speed, but
> it's certainly not regarded as a "speedy" mail reader...
> 

I saw all the Gnus love on this list and elsewhere, and decided to try
it when I was in search of an email client that does what I want.

These were my needs:

1. ability to read mail directories (synced with OfflineIMAP)
2. fast and responsive
3. easily searchable

With regards to (1), I had several issues.  I found it ridiculous that
Gnus inflates my maildir by almost 100% to be able to function! One
example:

323M    org-mode/
127M    org-mode/.nnmaildir/

The fact that it uses it's own message flags instead of the standard
maildir flags was also a hurdle.  With regards to speed (2), it doesn't
come close to any of the text based clients like mutt.  Given my
experience with (1) and (2), I didn't look at searchability.

In the end, I adopted mutt + emacsclient.  I think for searching, I'll
go with notmuch.  I would surely like to use Gnus, primarily because
it's in Emacs.  Specially I would like to use links to emails in
org-mode documents.  If someone has suggestions, I would be happy to
try.

Just my 2¢

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.