[OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[Marcin Borkowski]

Hi list,

sorry for an off-topic question, but I'm sure someone here will be
able to help me with this: I'm thinking about using Emacs as my email
client, and I'm considering using Gnus for that.  The Gnus manual is a
bit intimidating; is there any newbie-friendly tutorial which might help
get me started, taking into account that I do /not/ want to use Gmail,
but another (IMAP-aware) mail service?

Regards,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Adam Mickiewicz University

Re: [OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[John Hendy]

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On May 24, 2013 6:01 PM, "Marcin Borkowski" <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> wrote:
>
> Hi list,
>
> sorry for an off-topic question, but I'm sure someone here will be
> able to help me with this: I'm thinking about using Emacs as my email
> client, and I'm considering using Gnus for that.  The Gnus manual is a
> bit intimidating; is there any newbie-friendly tutorial which might help
> get me started, taking into account that I do /not/ want to use Gmail,
> but another (IMAP-aware) mail service?
>

Seconded. I tried following the tutorials that *do* exist once and just
gave up. Something tried and known to work and be complete would be
awesome. and I know there's a lot of gnus users on the list :)

John

> Regards,
>
> --
> Marcin Borkowski
> http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
> Adam Mickiewicz University
>

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Re: [OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[Eric Schulte]

John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com> writes:

> On May 24, 2013 6:01 PM, "Marcin Borkowski" <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> wrote:
>>
>> Hi list,
>>
>> sorry for an off-topic question, but I'm sure someone here will be
>> able to help me with this: I'm thinking about using Emacs as my email
>> client, and I'm considering using Gnus for that.  The Gnus manual is a
>> bit intimidating; is there any newbie-friendly tutorial which might help
>> get me started, taking into account that I do /not/ want to use Gmail,
>> but another (IMAP-aware) mail service?
>>
>
> Seconded. I tried following the tutorials that *do* exist once and just
> gave up. Something tried and known to work and be complete would be
> awesome. and I know there's a lot of gnus users on the list :)
>

I know the OP explicitly does not want to use gmail, however this gmail
solution is *very* concise and should be easily adapted to work with a
non-gmail imap service.

  http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusGmail#toc2

Just replace the gmail urls and ports with those of the service you want
to use.  Also, note that in blocks like the following

    (setq gnus-select-method '(nnimap "gmail"
                                      (nnimap-address "imap.gmail.com")
                                      (nnimap-server-port 993)
                                      (nnimap-stream ssl)))

in the 'nnimap "gmail"' portion the "gmail" is just a name, not
something special, and it can be replaced with any arbitrary string.

The starter-kit-gnus page of my starter kit may be helpful, however, it
doesn't provide much new information beyond that available at the
previous emacs wiki page.

http://eschulte.github.io/emacs24-starter-kit/starter-kit-gnus.html
https://raw.github.com/eschulte/emacs24-starter-kit/master/starter-kit-gnus.org

Hope this helps,

>
> John
>
>> Regards,
>>
>> --
>> Marcin Borkowski
>> http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
>> Adam Mickiewicz University
>>

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte

Re: [OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[Jacek Generowicz]

Marcin Borkowski writes:

> I'm thinking about using Emacs as my email client, and I'm considering
> using Gnus for that.

If it is Emacs rather than Gnus itself that attracts you, then you might
consider notmuch or mu4e. Both have a Xapian-based core, and include an
Emacs interface.

Re: [OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[Richard Lawrence]

Jacek Generowicz <jacek.generowicz@cern.ch> writes:

> Marcin Borkowski writes:
>
>> I'm thinking about using Emacs as my email client, and I'm considering
>> using Gnus for that.
>
> If it is Emacs rather than Gnus itself that attracts you, then you might
> consider notmuch or mu4e. Both have a Xapian-based core, and include an
> Emacs interface.

+1.

I used Gnus with an IMAP account for a while, but found that (in
addition to being intimidating and complicated) it was annoyingly slow.
I did write a brief tutorial about getting it set up, which you may or
may not find useful; it's at [1].  

I still use Gnus to read news (e.g., this list, via Gmane), which is
much simpler to set up, and pretty handy.

After abandoning Gnus for mail, but wishing to remain in Emacs, I tried
nmh with MH-E as a front end.  I liked MH-E well enough, but the big
problem was that I couldn't find any program to sync mail in both
directions from MH directories, and I want a local copy of my mail on
multiple machines which reflects the state on the IMAP server.

So, long story short, I have now switched to using offlineimap to sync
over IMAP with a Maildir.  This keeps my mail locally available but also
in sync across multiple machines.  I read this Maildir in mutt, not
Gnus, because I read nasty things on the Internet about how Gnus'
Maildir implementation really stinks (e.g., it uses its own tagging
system instead of the standard Maildir flags, and it eats up inodes on
your filesystem like crazy).  I use notmuch to index it, and
notmuch-mode in Emacs to search it.  I have my mutt editor set to
emacsclient.

It ain't perfect, by any means (and if anyone has suggestions on a
better setup, I'd love to hear them), but it works for me. 

[1] http://whereofwecannotspeak.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/getting-gnus-to-read-mail-over-imap/

-- 
Best,
Richard

Re: [OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[Suvayu Ali]

On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 03:29:03PM -0700, Richard Lawrence wrote:
> 
> So, long story short, I have now switched to using offlineimap to sync
> over IMAP with a Maildir.  This keeps my mail locally available but also
> in sync across multiple machines.  I read this Maildir in mutt, not
> Gnus, because I read nasty things on the Internet about how Gnus'
> Maildir implementation really stinks (e.g., it uses its own tagging
> system instead of the standard Maildir flags, and it eats up inodes on
> your filesystem like crazy).  I use notmuch to index it, and
> notmuch-mode in Emacs to search it.  I have my mutt editor set to
> emacsclient.

I use this mutt fork instead of mutt.

  <https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz>

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.

Re: [OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>:

> I used Gnus with an IMAP account for a while, but found that (in
> addition to being intimidating and complicated) it was annoyingly slow.

FWIW nnimap was rewritten a couple of years back, and on an IMAP server
that supports QRESYNC (eg. dovecot), it is quite fast these days.

I also think, but I don't know for sure, that if you start up gnus
without any config, it will ask for a server.

And if you give nnimap as the method, and if you give the DNS name of
the server running the IMAP server, and if that server is running on
port 143, then things should more or less work.  All of the folders on
the IMAP server will appear as nnimap groups.

But I could be wrong...:-)

Re: [OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[Glyn Millington]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> writes:

> Hi list,
>
> sorry for an off-topic question, but I'm sure someone here will be
> able to help me with this: I'm thinking about using Emacs as my email
> client, and I'm considering using Gnus for that.  The Gnus manual is a
> bit intimidating; is there any newbie-friendly tutorial which might
> help get me started, taking into account that I do /not/ want to use
> Gmail, but another (IMAP-aware) mail service?


Hi Marcin,

For me Gnus is the gold standard among mail/news clients.  It can be hard
work to set it up but it is worth it.  Alas, some good resources have
actually vanished from the web over  the years.


Sacha Chua describes a very basic set up for IMAP here:

http://sachachua.com/blog/2008/05/geek-how-to-use-offlineimap-and-the-dovecot-mail-server-to-read-your-gmail-in-emacs-efficiently/

If you are not running /Sendmail/Postfix/Exim etc you may find this page
helpful 

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SendingMail

There are of course several Gnus mailing lists/newsgroups.


Good luck!


Glyn

Re: [OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[Alan Schmitt]

Glyn Millington writes:

> For me Gnus is the gold standard among mail/news clients.  It can be hard
> work to set it up but it is worth it.  Alas, some good resources have
> actually vanished from the web over  the years.

Can Gnus be directly used with local mail in maildir format? If so, one
could easily switch between clients.

Alan

Re: [OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[Rémi Vanicat]

Alan Schmitt <alan.schmitt@polytechnique.org> writes:

> Glyn Millington writes:
>
>> For me Gnus is the gold standard among mail/news clients.  It can be hard
>> work to set it up but it is worth it.  Alas, some good resources have
>> actually vanished from the web over  the years.
>
> Can Gnus be directly used with local mail in maildir format? If so, one
> could easily switch between clients.

The bigger bugs for me in gnus is its inferior maildir support: it fail
to properly mark mail as read, it use its own meta-data file that can
cause problem to other mail client.... Hence the configs (as Sacha Chua
does) where one use dovecot to read maildir, letting gnus to connect to
dovecot instead of reading maildir directly.



-- 
Rémi Vanicat

Re: [OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[Rasmus]

Alan Schmitt <alan.schmitt@polytechnique.org> writes:

> Glyn Millington writes:
>
>> For me Gnus is the gold standard among mail/news clients.  It can be hard
>> work to set it up but it is worth it.  Alas, some good resources have
>> actually vanished from the web over  the years.
>
> Can Gnus be directly used with local mail in maildir format?

Yes. They say it's better these days.  Whether it's true I don't know.
I use dovecot.

For the record, this is what I use:

(setq rasmus/imap-method
        `(nnimap "mail"
                 (nnimap-stream shell)
                 (nnimap-shell-program "MAIL=maildir:$HOME/mail /usr/lib/dovecot/imap")))
(setq gnus-select-method '(nnml ""))  ;; good for offline
(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods rasmus/imap-method)
(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods
             '(nntp "gmane"
                    (nntp-address "news.gmane.org")))
(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods
             '(nntp "gwene"
                    (nntp-address "news.gwene.org")))


In my dovecot.conf (v2+) I have the following; I don't know if it's
important.

mail_location = maildir:~/mail:LAYOUT=fs

passdb {driver = pam}
ssl = no
userdb {driver = passwd}


–Rasmus

-- 
May the Force be with you