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.
I, too, have a Maildir Spotlight importer on my list of projects. I have made no more or no less progress on it than you have, apparently :) It's really too bad that Apple didn't choose Maildir for Mail.app's message storage; my understanding is that its format is very similar.
I recently did some research on integrating Address Book.app with Emacs, and decided to use external-abook.el rather than the eudc-* stuff. It works great, so far. Did you know about it when you chose eudc-mab, and is there any particular reason you chose the latter instead?
At the moment I'm using external-abook.el along with bbdb, mostly because of bbdb's snarfing. I have to use C-c TAB to expand addresses with external-abook.el, which is a bit of a pain, because my muscle memory is wired to use plain old tab ala bbdb. I should figure out what I need to do to swap the expand keys.
edit: the latest version of external-abook.el that I can find is here:
There's a git repo on Github somewhere, too, but the version on Emacswiki has some fixes that the Github one doesn't. Many developers of small, but useful, Emacs extensions have an unfortunate tendency to maintain their code on Emacswiki, rather than in a proper VCS. Oh well.
Interesting. I'm considering running a local imap server (to speed up search), but so far bbdb looks fine for contact search. I'll look up some way to get contact autocompletion, I'll take a look at eudc (I found a small page about it in the emacswiki). Thanks for making me aware of it!
I just tried eudc-bbdb, and it somehow works (oddly enough, it expands one contact but not another... I'll have to look at the configuration options). The eudc-mab solution looks better for my Mac, although I think bbdb can work better in the long run: I use a Macbook at home and a Linux netbook at work: I have my bbdb file in the Dropbox folder, thus I can have a nice cross-system contact file.
Yeah, you really want bi-directional syncing with the bbdb, because bbdb does nice autosnarfing and whatnot. That's a bit of a sticky wicket (understatement of the morning). It doesn't help that the bbdb code is largely incomprehensible.
The MH-E manual states "Most people use nmh, but you may be interested in trying out GNU mailutils MH, which supports IMAP."
The mailutils home page states "the utilities provided by Mailutils include imap4d and pop3d mail servers, mail reporting utility comsatd, general-purpose mail delivery agent maidag, mail filtering program sieve, and an implementation of MH message handling system."
I've always wanted to try this, but never found the time.
By the way, if you start your project, please, let me know! Spotlight is perfect for searching... If I can interact get it with emacs and my gmail accounts it is a win-win situation
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.
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.
Not really. My habits are far too ingrained at this point. I have taken on the INBOX/everything else structure at this point, though, and no longer maintain the vast array of twisty sorting rules of a decade ago.
Too, there's no google in my life, and every other webmail interface I've seen is utter, utter pants.
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.