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Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar


From: Jeff Clough
Subject: Moving from Thunderbird to Emacs for mail and calendar
Date: Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:33:41 -0400
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (Windows/20090812)

Okay, so I'm seriously considering switching from Thunderbird to Emacs (under Windows XP) for my mail and calendar needs, but I haven't used Emacs for either of these purposes in so long I don't know if it's feasible, nor am I certain which modes are "best". I'm hoping that some of you can point me in the right direction. I'd "just do it" as a test, but I'd rather not go through a crap ton of hassle and problems only to hear later "You should not have used foo mode for that, bar mode is what you want".

If you've got a bit of spare time and want to know my specific desires more deeply, please see the PS.

Thanks!

Jeff

P.S.

I need a fairly small number of features:

1. It needs to work on Windows XP without having to install a unix/posix environment like Cygwin. I *am* willing to install discrete utilities if necessary (if Emacs doesn't do POP on its own and needs some external program to do it, for instance).

2. I have just under seven thousand messages in various folders (mbox files) that I'll be wanting to keep, so it needs to not choke and die when confronted with "many" messages.

3. I need to have my calendar appointments either in my face at all times (I can live with it being in a split window or a new frame I just leave open) or have the alarms/reminders be insistent and arbitrarily settable (remind me 15 minutes in advance for this appointment and 30 minutes before this one). I have a lot of appointments and a very bad memory for these sorts of things.

4. Reading HTML messages should be possible, but my needs here are minimal. I'll settle for what Lynx looked like circa 1995. I just need the message to be legible.

The things I'm hoping to get from moving to Emacs:

1. The ability to stay in Emacs for more of my tasks and use its editing commands which are now so ingrained into my hands there's no hope of going back.

2. The ability to search for messages and have the results be what I want. That means finding all the messages with my search string and *not* finding messages that don't have my search string. I thought this is what "Search" implied, but Thunderbird has its own ideas.

3. The ability to use the keyboard for marking messages as read, deleting messages, moving them around, etc. A lot of this stuff is relegated to the mouse and switching from mouse to keyboard and back is getting really special annoying.

Things I don't need:

1.  I don't use newsgroups or to-do lists.

2. I don't care about in-line attachments and would prefer not to see them anyway. As long as I can pull them out of the message and save them somewhere sane, that works for me.

3. Bonus points if I can diddle a link in an email message and have Emacs bring it up in Firefox, but I'm not married to it.

Thanks for listening!

--

Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/





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