Re: some mail annoyances

[Ken McGlothlen <mcglk@serv.net>]

s911254@stud.nhh.no (Christian Nybø) writes:

| Per Bothner <per@bothner.com> writes:
| 
| [...]
| > Gnus *could* be that recommended mailer for everybody using Emacs.  It is
| > very close - it just needs a little bit of usability engineering, some
| > tweaking of the defaults, and some better documentation It certainly has
| > the power and flexibility.  However, the defaults are a bit unnatural, the
| > standard keybindings are optimized for news rather than mail, and there is
| > no good introduction to using Gnus.  (The latter should *start* by
| > explaining how to use it for mail, since that is what people need *first*.)
| 
| Where do you see VM in that picture?

Well, this is just one guy's perspective.  Please pardon the narrative form.

When I first started using something besides /usr/bin/mail to read my mail and
/usr/local/bin/rn to read my news, I chose Emacs, my favorite editor (at that
time, somewhere in either late v17 or early v18), and used RMAIL and Masanobu
Umeda's GNUS (which at the time, of course, had no mail-reading capabilities).

The shortcomings of RMAIL have been covered extensively elsewhere.  I hated it,
wanted to get back to using something that respected the mbox format, and
finally discovered VM.  GNUS, on the other hand, I loved, and made a lot of
customizations that made it even cooler for me to use.  Except for that one
sticky point:  Umeda-san had basically walked away from it, guaranteeing no
further development.

You can imagine how relieved and delighted I was when Lars announced he was
going to take over development.  If memory serves, I think I wrote him a
thank-you note when I heard about it.

And then Lars pointed out that he wanted to make GNUS handle email as well.
Zowie, I thought---VM is a nice enough package (and as you can see from the
headers, I still use it, at v6.72), but it has some limitations that rather
annoy me.  The thought of using a package that would thread my email, and one I
didn't have to remember different strokes to, was very, very cool.

It hasn't worked out that way.  I've tried converting to Gnus on several
occasions, but never with any good success.

For example, a few months ago, I unexpectedly wound up being CEO of a small,
troubled ISP.  I was suddenly receiving a LOT of email (this from a guy who's
signed up not only to ding@gnus.org, but questions@freebsd.org) that I
absolutely had to keep organized.  The best way I could think of was to bite
the bullet and use Gnus, but needed some quick guidance.  I wrote Lars, if
memory serves (those first few weeks were a blur), who gave me sound advice,
but I couldn't get it working effectively in a short enough amount of time, and
wound up using PINE.  Ulk.

As I said, I'm still using VM, not GNUS.  Why?

Well, lessee.  I have over 400 mail folders comprising over 100MB of email, all
in mbox format.  I need to conveniently transfer messages between folders (I do
occasionally reorganize folders).  I do use procmail, but only use it to break
out mailing list from personal mail---if I were to use GNUS, I'd like to
shuttle it all into appropriate folders, but don't know how to do it in some
cases.  (For example, mail from userA to me should go in the userA folder, but
mail from userA to me *and* userB, userC, userD and userE should go in the
groupZ folder.)  The deletion/expiration stuff can be a bit confusing; I've
lost mail on occasion when trying to convert over.  And it's not a matter of
just having tried once; I've tried six times to move from VM to Gnus, letting
my incoming mail pile up over a couple of days while I try to figure out how to
get Gnus to work well, but eventually giving up and going back to VM when I run
out of spare time, or when the mail pile gets too huge.

There needs to be a "So you use an mbox-style mail reader, and would like to
use Gnus?" document somewhere, for example.  I'd be happy to write it,
even---I'm articulate, after all (well, I think so, at any rate), but I haven't
been able to get it working smoothly enough to convert myself.

If someone wants to help me work through this process, I'll be more than happy
to write up said document.

							---Ken