Re: [OT] Gnus mail tutorial?

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

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