Re: Problem with Rmail

[Florian v. Savigny]

Albino,

writing/sending and receiving/reading emails are two (even more
accurately, four) separate things in Emacs (if you use Rmail, that
is). For writing, you use mail-mode (which you invoke by calling M-x
mail); for sending, you need to configure a program that sends it - it
can be the Emacs library smtpmail.el, which should, however, be
replaced by smtpmail-auth.el. But you can also use an external program
such as sendmail or procmail.

Try: 

C-h i Emacs m Mail Sending

For receiving mail, you equally have a host of options. Emacs itself
can download mail from POP hosts (I do not know about IMAP); see Emacs
info node 33.19. But you can also use an external program such as
fetchmail, which is required to store the mail locally in a spool
file, from where rmail in turn will move it to its "inbox".

Rmail is only used to read the mail (and sort it and so on). It is
invoked by typing M-x rmail, and will read your primary inbox, which
must be set in your .emacs configuration file (but there is also a
default, which I do not quite remember). When you answer an email from
within Rmail ("r" - "rmail-reply"), this in fact pops up a buffer and
invokes mail-mode, so this is where the circle closes.

As you will have noticed, getting mail and rmail to run can involve a
certain amount of tinkering, and also going through the manuals. Also,
it is the oldest way to handle mail, and pretty basic in its
functionality. 

(It is curious, by the way, that you can install rmail separately. 
Normally, it should come as a part of Emacs.)

Of course I cannot even guess why you think Rmail is
better for *you*, but from my point of view, the advantages are that

- you can program your own extensions around it, which I have done
  quite a lot, and I now rely on them (that is of course something
  which is possibly with any Emacs library, but in this case I can
  confirm it is feasible)

- you can use etach to strip attachments, which reduces the size of
  mail files by magnitudes (even though etach is no longer actively
  maintained, it still works)

- you can use more than one mail file (even though this also means
  some modest amount of programming)

If none of these is of particular interest to you, it seems likely to
me that other packages would be more covenient. Emacs alone has at
least two others (mh and gnus).

Hope this helps you a bit further.

Best regards,

Florian