Re: some mail annoyances

[Per Bothner <per@bothner.com>]

Thanks for the various reponses in this thread.  I have gotten work-arounds
for some of the annoyances, and I will see how they work out.  I think
various people have made many of the points I would make.  However, let
me make one last point (for now): 

Some have made the point that it is wrong to think of Gnus as a mail-reader
- it is a news reader that is also great for reading mail.  Trying to
force Gnus into the mold of a mail reader violates its "philosophy".
That may be the case, but it is wrong philosophy for general users.
For almost everybody, mail is much more important than news.  Everybody
uses mail, but far from everybody uses news.  Also, people *start* out
dealing with email, and then maybe later they get to reading news.
People depend on mail;  almost no-one depends on news.

Thus it is more important to get mail "right" than it is to get news
right.  What is the "right" interface will of course differ from person
to person, which is why it is nice to be able to customize things.
It would be nice if there was a "recommended" mail program, which
is powerful, flexible - *and* easy to learn (including having a good
introductory manual).  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*.)
-- 
	--Per Bothner
bothner@pacbell.net  per@bothner.com   http://home.pacbell.net/bothner/