Re: Is the modern Internet destroying GNUS?

[David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu>]

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