Re: How do you read mails when gnus is not available?

[David Z Maze <dmaze@MIT.EDU>]

Jinhyok Heo <novembre+dated+1059016389.f4e7aa@ournature.org> writes:

> Well, I want to know how you send and receive mails when your guns is
> not available?

If you're in a situation where you can read mail via IMAP and make
arbitrary outgoing SMTP connections, any other mail reader is fine.  I
tend to use mutt (with vi as an editor) when I'm not willing to wait
for Gnus to start up or dig through my mail.  (And before I figured
out that mutt in fact required far less configuration than Gnus, I was
using pine in the same way.)

> Gnus is something that I cannot do without. But sometimes I am away
> From my machine and it is hard to get good connection to my machine.
> It is quite difficult to do something with a remote gnus due to the
> slow connection.

What problems do you have?  How I use Gnus depends on what sort of
network I have:

-- Excellent (Ethernet to the file servers): run Gnus locally, read
   mail via nnml from networked filesystem (AFS)

-- Good (cable modem): run Gnus remotely with X forwarding

-- Bad (dialup, congested net): run Gnus remotely in text mode in
   screen

I do recommend using screen(1) if you're going to run Emacs in text
mode in a slow environment.  That way if you lose your connection you
haven't lost Emacs, you just need to reconnect to the dormant screen
session.  I do recommend changing the default command key binding,
though, since screen's default (C-a) is also the Emacs start-of-line
character; I use C-].

{14} dmaze% cat .screenrc
startup_message off
escape ^]a

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell