Is the modern Internet destroying GNUS?

Is the modern Internet destroying GNUS?

[pip]

Hi all,

I'm a recent addition to the Gnus user base and really appreciate its
power and flexibility but feel a little disappointed I can't use it as
I would like. With usenet full of spam and emails full of HTML and
unquoted references I have a nasty feeling there will never be a way I
can happily use Gnus at work.

Outlook and Lotus notes are destroying the web :(

Anyway, may I ask how other users cope with these annoyances?

Pip

Re: Is the modern Internet destroying GNUS?

[Tim McNamara]

pip <ihate@spam.com> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm a recent addition to the Gnus user base and really appreciate
> its power and flexibility but feel a little disappointed I can't use
> it as I would like. With usenet full of spam and emails full of HTML
> and unquoted references I have a nasty feeling there will never be a
> way I can happily use Gnus at work.

Have you looked into using w3m?

> Outlook and Lotus notes are destroying the web :(

Eh?

> Anyway, may I ask how other users cope with these annoyances?

C-c C-y takes care of most of the HTML based e-mails I get, since 99%
of them are spam.

Re: Is the modern Internet destroying GNUS?

[David Z Maze]

pip <ihate@spam.com> writes:

> I'm a recent addition to the Gnus user base and really appreciate its
> power and flexibility but feel a little disappointed I can't use it as
> I would like. With usenet full of spam and emails full of HTML and
> unquoted references I have a nasty feeling there will never be a way I
> can happily use Gnus at work.
>
> Outlook and Lotus notes are destroying the web :(
>
> Anyway, may I ask how other users cope with these annoyances?

I personally use spam.el to sort out my spam, using the spam-stat.el
statistical scoring package as a backend.  (This is nice for
portability -- I use the same data on several different systems with a
shared filesystem -- and not quite so good for performance, but it
does do a reasonably good job.)

HTML mail I mostly have the luxury of ignoring.  It seems like most of
the world has finally recognized that there must be at least one text
part, even if the text refers to other bits of text in red or
italicized or whatever.  You can also hook up either the (old) Emacs
w3-mode or the standalone w3m Web browser to read HTML mail.

My big annoyance is actually that I can't do things like drop a
text/x-patch part in the middle of my messages in the general case,
because I know most readers (including many of the "friendly"
*nix-based ones) won't present the message the same way Gnus does.
Which is sad, because Gnus does a pretty nice job, and as a coder
being able to discuss small patches is useful.

  --dzm

Re: Is the modern Internet destroying GNUS?

[Phil Stripling]

pip <ihate@spam.com> writes:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm a recent addition to the Gnus user base and really appreciate its
> power and flexibility but feel a little disappointed I can't use it as
> I would like. With usenet full of spam and emails full of HTML and

I think Usenet has always had more than its share of spam, but gnus has
scoring to get rid of most of it from the newsgroups.

As for email full of HTML, _generally_ it, too, is spam, so who cares? On
the rare occasion it's from someone I know, I email back and say I don't
download or read HTML email because of all the Microsoft viruses.
_Everyone_ knows what I'm talking about. The fact that I'm reading email in
a text-only mail reader while logged into a Linux shell account from my Mac
never gets mentioned. :->

> unquoted references I have a nasty feeling there will never be a way I
> can happily use Gnus at work.

Work is a different issue, if it is _expected_ that you will read email in
all its full HTML glory. Another poster has suggested an option, but if the
workplace requires HTML, the workplace is asking for trouble. C'est la
vie. 

> 
> Outlook and Lotus notes are destroying the web :(

True -- well, not the Web, exactly; the internet.

-- 
Phil Stripling           | email to the replyto address is presumed
The Civilized Explorer   | spam and read later. email from this URL
http://www.cieux.com/    | http://www.civex.com/     is read daily.

Re: Is the modern Internet destroying GNUS?

[François Fleuret]

Good evening,

<ihate@spam.com> wrote on 17 Feb 2005 19:47:16 MET:

> Outlook and Lotus notes are destroying the web :(

Actually, I though that for a few years, say 1995-2000, but realized
after a while that despire the power of the dark side, I have no
problem so far using only gnus as a mail reader, and GNU/Linux as an
OS.

As someone pointed out here, since "people" knows what a mess is
associated to fancy-htmlized-multimedia mails most of them stick with
pure text, sometime with JPG attached, and once a month with some
crazy powerpoint or flash stuff, which can be politely ignored.

For spam I am behind a excellent spam filter (tailored version of
spamassassin if I got it correctly) and since it has been activated, I
saw the spam rate dropping from 150 spam per day to one per day. Too
bad for the false positives, havent noticed one yet.

So I have a far more positive feeling than 5 years ago. I am (almost)
convinced that I will not have to handle all this multi-media
annoyance for at least 10 more years.

Cheers,

-- 
François Fleuret

Re: Is the modern Internet destroying GNUS?

[Joe Fineman]

Tim McNamara <timmcn@bitstream.net> writes:

> Have you looked into using w3m?

I am using w3m to read just one Web site (www.mudcat.org), which has
the peculiarity that it contains no graphics and that most of its
links are to itself.  For that purpose, being able to read & post
within Emacs is a blessing, despite the clunkiness of the interface
(having to go to the minibuffer to fill in text, etc.).  For most of
the Web sites I read, however, I want to look at the pictures, and for
the time being there is no easy way to do that in w3m, tho I gather
that is being worked on.
-- 
---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||:  Everybody is close to some edge.  :||

Re: Is the modern Internet destroying GNUS?

[Joe Fineman]

pip <ihate@spam.com> writes:

> I'm a recent addition to the Gnus user base and really appreciate
> its power and flexibility but feel a little disappointed I can't use
> it as I would like. With usenet full of spam and emails full of HTML
> and unquoted references I have a nasty feeling there will never be a
> way I can happily use Gnus at work.

As to spam, I find that my visual system is a wonderful instrument for
ignoring it.  On the newsgroups I browse, I ignore most of the
postings that are not spam, so ignoring spam is not a large additional
burden.

As to HTML, I agree with some others in this company that in email &
newsgroups it is an almost sure sign of spam.  It is true that in some
mailing lists people reply with a default that dishes out the HTML for
you to skip over after you have read the plain text; but that is
merely ignorance & rudeness, like not deleting the irrelevant parts of
what is being replied to; it is annoying, but it is not an
overwhelming nuisance, and it is not Gnus's fault.
-- 
---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||:  You're talking in my sleep.  :||

Re: Is the modern Internet destroying GNUS?

[Trent Buck]

Up spake Joe Fineman:
> I am using w3m to read just one Web site (www.mudcat.org), which has
> the peculiarity that it contains no graphics and that most of its
> links are to itself.  For that purpose, being able to read & post
> within Emacs is a blessing, despite the clunkiness of the interface
> (having to go to the minibuffer to fill in text, etc.).  For most of
> the Web sites I read, however, I want to look at the pictures, and for
> the time being there is no easy way to do that in w3m, tho I gather
> that is being worked on.

Under w3m-el / X11, S-t will toggle inline graphics.

Under w3m / xterm, the w3m-img package adds support for inline graphics.

-- 
-trent
If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if
it is not shared. -- St. Augustine

Re: Is the modern Internet destroying GNUS?

[Tim McNamara]

Joe Fineman <joe_f@verizon.net> writes:

> Tim McNamara <timmcn@bitstream.net> writes:
>
>> Have you looked into using w3m?
>
> I am using w3m to read just one Web site (www.mudcat.org), which has
> the peculiarity that it contains no graphics and that most of its
> links are to itself.  For that purpose, being able to read & post
> within Emacs is a blessing, despite the clunkiness of the interface
> (having to go to the minibuffer to fill in text, etc.).  For most of
> the Web sites I read, however, I want to look at the pictures, and
> for the time being there is no easy way to do that in w3m, tho I
> gather that is being worked on.

Right, my point was that you can use w3m to read HTML e-mail, which
seemed to be what you were asking about in your original post.  As
someone else pointed out, you can toggle inline graphics in w3m so
that you can see them.  For looking at real Web sites, though, I just
have Emacs/Gnus pass the URL to Camino; I could probably use it for
HTML e-mail, too, but since 99.5% of the HTML e-mail I receive is
spam, why bother?