Re: New Gnus user

[kbk@shore.net (Kurt B. Kaiser)]

Arnaud Vandyck <arnaud.vandyck@ulg.ac.be> writes:

> I had some problems managing lot and lot of mail (but maybe I do it
> wrong). Do you think (be honest) that Gnus is better for that?
>
> Can someone give the main advantages/ defeacts between Gnus and Mew

Gnus is pretty open-ended.  If you want to do complicated things, it's
unbeatable.  In my case:

Mail comes into shore.net, and my procmail there strips off my
whitelist and my mail lists into IMAP groups.  It then filtered the
rest for spam keywords and repeat offenders and fed the output to a
MailToRead group.  Gnus accesses this account and splits it into
further groups.

That became insufficient lately :-)  Shore doesn't have *any* spam
filters, so now my procmail ships the output to another account which
runs virus checks and spamassassin and provides IMAP webmail if I
need it.

Gnus is looking at both the shore.net account and the other IMAP
account.  It does splitting on the latter into about five groups and
manages the spamassassin Junk (7 day expunge) and Trash (1 day
expunge).  If anything actually gets through all this, I have my
scoring all set up (from the previous configuration) so F5 scores it
down and moves to the next article.  If they make it to the bottom of
my 30 day score file, they get added to the procmail blacklist. (But I
don't think that is going to get used much anymore.)

I'm dealing with about 30 mail groups including mail, lists,
newsgroups, and local groups.  I subscribe and unsubscribe as
needed. The local groups hold archives and lists that I want to save
because they aren't archived on the internet. In those cases I have
set the groups on shore.net to expire to a local group on my computer
instead of "delete", and they download automagically.

Gnus handles the whole mess seamlessly with one display of typically
10 groups of unread items coming from three news sources and two
mail sources.

On the other hand, I've got my wife using it.  She was using emacs for
editing magazine articles and books and was using Hotmail webmail.  We
wanted to get away from that, so I tried her on Opera 7.  The first
thing that came up was "there's no spell checker!!"  Since she thinks
aspell is the greatest, I said, "Why not?" and set her up with Gnus
and a 10 line cheatsheet.  This is working great.  C-c c brings up the
emacs/gnus cheatsheet, C-c m starts gnus, and C-c a opens her .mailrc.
Middleclick on a url starts Opera.  She doesn't even know what Usenet
is.

-- 
KBK