[Techtalk] Does anyone use emacs for email?

[David Sumbler]

Angelina Carlton <brat at magma.ca> writes:

> I want to try and use emacs as my mail client. I tried to install vm,
> rmail and wanderlust but for various reasons each were met with
> faliure.
>
> The one app I have avoided is considered to be the best for
> email/emacs and that is Gnus. I was told it is very difficult to
> setup and since I cannot set up the easy ones on my own, I am
> wondering if anyone else has set up gnus before and can point me to
> some howto or tutorial that suits my situation.
>
> The problems I found was none of the material I googled matched my
> setup:
>
> 1. Maildir format mailbox
> 2. Fetchmail and Procmail to place and sort my mail into ~/mail
>
> Most of the guides assume an mbox format, or that gnus will fetch the
> mail itself and I will then set rules for gnus to sort it. I wish it
> would just read what ever is in each folder.
>
> Maybe I am going about it all wrong and should dump procmail and
> fetchmail?
>
> any thoughts/recomendations?

I'm definitely no expert, but I started using Gnus some months ago,
and I've never looked back.

I downloaded the Gnus Manual ( http//:www.gnus.org/manual.html ) and
actually printed it out - all 520 pages of it!  There's also a very
useful "reference card" (actually a 6 page listing of commands), but I
can't find an address for it at the moment.

I have also had additional help via the newsgroup gnu.emacs.gnus .

I think you just have to take the bull by the horns and go for it.
Gnus copies mail into its own folders, so if you're careful you can
use your old mail client and Gnus too until you're sure you've got
everything working properly.  But in any case, I would recommend
setting it up just for reading news first of all; then, when you're
happy with that, you can start to get it working for mail too.

Previously I was using Pine as my mail/news client.  Gnus is about
1,000 times better.  I love it.

Give it a go.  I'll be any help I can, but you can get plenty of
/expert/ help on gnu.emacs.gnus, as I mentioned above.  As I said, I
am no expert.

It's probably a help with Gnus if you have some knowledge of Lisp.  My
knowledge is very basic though, and you can do quite a lot without
really understanding Lisp at all.

David

-- 

David Sumbler

david at aeolia.co.uk