Re: Email reader - anything newer/better than gnus

[kai@emptydomain.de (Kai Großjohann)]

I think there are not that many Emacs email readers:

Rmail
Gnus
MH-E
VM
MEW
Wanderlust

Richard uses Rmail, AFAIK, so it must be able to handle really large
amounts of mail.  MH-E is an MH (or nmh) frontend; perhaps it's cool
that you can also use command line tools to manipulate your mail.

Others have mentioned things about MEW and Wanderlust and VM.

Besides Emacs, I've tried Thunderbird and Opera recently.  Thunderbird
is nice because it is extensible and can be configured for almost sane
keybindings.  (I like the quickfile add-on, it is better than B m in
Gnus.)  Another nice feature is that it shows HTML formatted mail
close to the way the sender intended, and at one point I got a lot of
that with weird fonts and colors, all semantically relevant.  ("Find
my comments inline in orange."  Outlook uses...)

Opera is cool because it allows you to treat mail so differently than
you are used to.  It maintains a fulltext index at all times, allowing
you really quick access to it, and that gives you a totally different
way of working with mail.  It also contains learning filters that
automatically folder your mail for you.  (Think of a Bayesian spam
filter, applied to all folders.)  Another admirable feat is speed: I
entered a folder with 30,000 (!) messages in it and it was
instantaneous!  (Displaying the equivalent of the Gnus summary buffer
was instantaneous, to be precise.)

After using Opera, I knew that having to move messages into folders
sucks.  However, Opera is not free (libre).

Some day, there will be similar features in Gnus.

(For searching, there is gnus-namazu and also nnir, but they are
different from the Opera support.  For learning auto-foldering (in
Gnus speak, splitting), see ifile.  I vaguely remember having seen
gnus-ifile.el somewhere...)

Does anyone have a solution for rendering HTML mail?  emacs-w3m works
great for some of it, but not if font size and color (and background
images!¹) are semantically relevant.

Kai

¹ Once I got an email just saying "Regards, Peter" (as if it was the
  footer of a message without the preceding text).  I saved the HTML
  and displayed it in Firefox, then discovered that the background
  image was intended to convey "thank you".