
The emacs 30 Day Challenge: Using 'gnus' to read mail - RBerenguel
http://www.mostlymaths.net/2010/12/emacs-30-day-challenge-using-gnus-to.html
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jfb
I've been using Gnus exclusively to read mail since I switched away from using
mh. There's good stuff in here; something to consider is the eudc-mab
integration; that way, you can get autocompletion of your address book. I
worked on a bi-directional Address Book/iCal bridge for a while in my typical
desultory fashion but gave it up when work intruded.

My next project that I will likely never finish (but perhaps start!) is a
Spotlight importer for Maildirs, as my baroque mail reading setup involves
syncing all my various mail accounts via offlineimap to my local machine,
where I run an IMAP server. It'd sure be nice to get the benefit of Spotlight
indexing without having to have Apple's wretched mail client running all the
time.

~~~
gms
Do you feel a tinge of jealousy when you see 'normal' people simply use Gmail?

~~~
dhess
Only for searching. This feeling is mitigated a bit by the recent improvements
in nnir IMAP search in the development version of Gnus, but it's still not as
nice as Gmail search.

On the other hand, I use Gmail to archive some mailing lists (precisely
because the search is so good -- almost always better than whatever archiving
system the list maintainers are using), and my _god_ is it slow! Slow to
switch folders, slow to search.... So in that regard, I don't understand how
people use Gmail as their primary MUA.

On occasion I hear a story about how someone complains that Gmail is slow,
often in a public place like Twitter, and then some magical Gmail fairy moves
their records to a less-contended shard/tablet/whatever, which improves
things. Maybe I'm just unlucky.

~~~
RBerenguel
I have installed the latest cvs gnus... And search looks broken: I made a
search (that I knew worked) and it keeps on fetching and reordering the buffer
of results forever. I'll try to check what is going on, or waiting a little
longer... :/

Edited: Holy sh*t! Installed the latest GIT gnus... Blazingly fast!! I'll
write about it this week, this is something that needs to be installed... I
just can say WOW.

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alec
The "reading mail in emacs" option he didn't mention is notmuch
(<http://notmuchmail.org/>). It's a mail indexer with full-text search and a
few front-ends, the most-widely used being for emacs. It's search is really
fast, and it was fast enough to make me forget folders once and for all.

~~~
RBerenguel
I didn't mention because I have not tried yet, some people suggested it in
Reddit. I'll try it some of these days, the problem is that configuring it in
Mac OS will take me more time (probably!) than I have this week. But it is
something I have in my list, thanks for reminding me of it ;)

~~~
julian37
For what it's worth, MacPorts has all the dependencies. Worked for me out of
the box after doing:

    
    
      $ sudo port install valgrind gmime talloc xapian-core glib2

~~~
RBerenguel
Thanks, I'll try it tomorrow then... It is well worth the try to get fast
search

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billmcneale
There is one thing that Gnus was awesome at: dynamic scoring.

It would monitor what you read and assign different weights to articles based
on your habits: author of a post gets +10 points, keywords in a subject +2
points each, etc...

Then it reordered the newsgroup articles based on these weights.

After a week or so, you realize that when you enter a newsgroup, you will
typically read the first 5-10 discussions that Gnus has put at the top of the
list and just ignore the rest.

It was magical and I don't think any other newsreader has ever come close to
that.

~~~
edenc
the three features that made me move into gnus: 1 - scoring - which you just
mentioned 2 - group levels - you can assign levels to each of the mail
groups/folders and it'll only download groups in each level at a time, it's
very good for organization. 3 - integration with org-mode - you can add an
annotated link to an email with a single keypress, it's a lot more productive
than copy-pasting text because you know where the text came from and you can
reply to the email on the spot, with another key press.

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joe_the_user
I can't help myself. I have to ask, even it's annoying to say, "What is the
interest in finding new ways to use lame, 30 year old interfaces?"

And yes, this sounds trollish but I honestly am interested in what
applications promise new, interesting advances to computer interfaces. You can
do do anything in EMACS, FORTH or MASM but the question is how easily and
naturally.

~~~
ams6110
The nice thing for me about emacs interfaces is that they are all very
similar. I spend about 90% of my time in emacs. I use it for email (gnus),
chat (jabber.el), writing code (locally, and remotely via TRAMP), interacting
with version control repos, running shells, interacting with databases,
planning and managing my work (org-mode), invoicing clients, etc.

In all of this the same basic keybindings work the same way. This reduces the
context switching overhead as move from one task to another. Yeah it looks
primitive, being text mode and all, but it's soooo productive.

~~~
RBerenguel
Thanks to the wonders of "backtype", a direct commenter in the post asks for
what do you use (in emacs, I assume) to invoice clients. If I don't ask here
directly you would never know about the question!

Agreed with your "high productivity" statement. Being able to just write, kill
and yank without even thinking what my fingers are doing feels so much better
than context-switching to Cmd-C, Cmd-V, oh no this is in X11 Ctrl-C Ctrl-v....

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spocksynder
I really recommend "Mew"(<http://www.mew.org/en/>) as an option for email in
Emacs. I was able to really customize it to my needs. Its exactly like Emacs
in its extensibility.

Gnus is a little overrated in my opinion.

~~~
jfb
Gnus carries a lot of usenet cruft, no question. But the last time I tried
'mew' or 'wanderlust' I got pretty angry:

[http://homonculus.net/posts/nerdism/2009-10-08-attention_jap...](http://homonculus.net/posts/nerdism/2009-10-08-attention_japanese_emacs_package_maintainers.html)

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Estragon
I've been using gnus as my primary mail reader for seven years, but it feels
like it's getting a bit long in the tooth. Pulling messages down from the IMAP
server and putting it in the appropriate folders takes a good 20s, whereas for
the webmail clients I occasionally resort to, retrieval of the header
information for new mail is instantaneous.

The notmuch application sounds very useful. Searching my mail has been the
other big pain point which often leads me to resort to another client.

~~~
dhess
Have you tried the development version of gnus (from git) in the last 2 or 3
months? Lars has returned and is making lots of improvements, especially in
IMAP performance and search.

I have about 200 mail folders, and the dev version of gnus now starts up in
about 5 seconds, whereas the version included in Emacs 23.2 took about 1
minute during IMAP session bring-up. Refreshing the group view is now quite
fast for me, too.

I believe that nnir has been rewritten from scratch. Doing a 'G G' search
against my dovecot server on a folder with several hundred messages takes only
a couple of seconds. The new nnir also has support for various kinds of search
filters, including a mode where you can type a raw IMAP search string, if the
included filters aren't sophisticated enough for your queries. Unfortunately,
it's not well-documented yet, so you have to search the mailing list or read
the .el file to discover what it can do, at the moment.

Anyway, try the development version of gnus, and see if addresses any of your
complaints.

~~~
RBerenguel
I'll also check the dev version: searching and moving mails is really slow. I
hope this solves it, thanks for pointing it out!

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ltsampros
I have exactly the same Gnus setup. fantastic! However, one of the most
frustrating things currently is the wrong message counts when messages
'disappear' from the backend either because they moved or deleted. Also when
you get prompted by Gnus on how many messages you want to fetch from the
server is broken by the above.

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abhiyerra
I got a bit tired with Emacs' mail readers (VM and Gnus) and moved to mutt.

