> Gnus is notoriously hard to set up, but I found it has some remarkable features.
Maybe things have changed now, but several years ago I wanted to setup Gnus, and asked for help on IRC (#emacs IIRC) because there weren't many good resources online. The response was "if you need to ask for help, then Gnus isn't for you."
Honestly, that's probably true. Not in some elitist, "if you have to ask, you're not smart enough" kind of way, but in a "if you have to ask, then you're the kind of person for whom figuring out how to set up an esoteric email program isn't fun, and you're not going to like it much here" kind of way.
Gnus is fairly painful to set up. I did write something up several years ago about getting it going the way I wanted (http://www.cataclysmicmutation.com/2010/11/multiple-gmail-ac...). I haven't used Gnus for a few years now, having first gone to mu4e and now due to corporate fun, Microsoft Outlook, so that document may or may not be currently useful.
Well if you need to ask basic things that means you haven't read the manual, which can easily get you going with a relatively fancy setup. People naturally don't like explaining things that are already explained in a manual that's a C-h I away, hyperlinked and friendly. Emacs is one of the few projects that have good docs, and probably the best among them wrt the accessibility and ease of use of the manual. And still some people hate on Info, probably because they don't read/write documentation at all...
Maybe things have changed now, but several years ago I wanted to setup Gnus, and asked for help on IRC (#emacs IIRC) because there weren't many good resources online. The response was "if you need to ask for help, then Gnus isn't for you."