At 03 Mar 2003 08:38:40 +1100, Alan L Tyree wrote: > What do emacs users use for mail other than Rmail. I find that I am > spending more and more time in emacs. VM? MH? any other?
Rmail sucks. its basically emacs' mail(1). VM is good, but uses its own format to store mail. It was important to me that my mail client didn't do that (since I like to be able to change mail clients easily). If that doesn't bother you, I recommend you give VM a try. GNUS is good. I haven't used it for a long time, but I see many people who use it. Since its heritage is as a news reader, it deals with mailing lists extremely well (scoring, filtering, etc). I believe it does IMAP, etc (it supports many backends). Apparently it can even view an RSS feed as a mailbox, which is quite cool. Emacs' MH is supposed to be good if you use MH already for mail, I don't (and never have). Wanderlust is really good, particularly with disconnected (offline) IMAP. Its on a par with evolution feature-wise, except that for some reason it can't read mbox files directly (need to bounce through an IMAP server or use Maildir or something). Seems to combine many of the good bits of GNUS, with a reasonably easy to use gui interface. The only downside (other than the mbox thing) is that its from the Japanese Free Software Alternate Dimension and so its a little hard to find english documentation (basic user docs are fine; advanced customisation examples are scarce). It took me a bit of customising before I had it up to the standard of my previous mutt configuration, but now I'm very happy with it. Another Japanese Free Software Alternate Dimension product is Mew. Wanderlust borrows many of its keybindings, etc from Mew which is why it feels a little unfamiliar to mutt-trained fingers. I don't know much about it, but I don't know why you would use it when wanderlust was available. Otherwise, you can use mutt with your editor set to "gnuclient -nw -f post-mode" or something (post-el.deb for debian users). One of the main advantages to using emacs for mail reading (I found), is the easy customisation and heavy integration. For example, It was a few lines of simple elisp to have the appropriate bug numbers become hyperlinks to the Debian BTS, or to our company RT web pages. I have the BBDB address book automatically tracking names, companies, x-face images, last subject line, whether I've seen the person on a Debian or SLUG mailing list, etc - which is much better than a manual address book. Adding support for the new Face header (base64 encoded PNG) was a simple matter of cutting-and-pasting half a page of elisp code - no recompile necessary. Wanderlust/XEmacs configuration files availble on request, if anyone decides to try wanderlust, I strongly recommend they grab my ~/.wl, rather than grope through automatically translated Japanese web pages as I did.. -- - Gus -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
