[emacs-wiki-discuss] Using gnus somewhat painful?

[Gregory Novak]

Some time ago I started reading mail in Emacs because of PlannerMode
(so that I could have links to messages and such).  I started with VM,
which was fine but is starting to get moldy.  I switched to Gnus and
have been having a somewhat difficult time.  People on the Gnus
mailing list seem somewhat prickly so I'm posting here to see if
anyone has useful experience.

Getting things working (setting up the servers and such) wasn't a
problem and I'm using the nnimap backend.  Most of the trouble seems
to stem from that fact.  A few of the problems:

- Gnus doesn't seem good about either maintaining or restarting the
  connection to the IMAP server.  Many times I have to quit Gnus and
  restart.  Sometimes this seems to cause emacs to hang forever and I
  have to kill it.
- When using Gnus in the "plugged" mode where it talks directly to the
  imap server for every action, it's just slow enough to be annoying.
  I looked into using the Gnus agent to solve this.  Sure enough, it's
  _much_ faster (even pleasant) to use since messages are displayed
  instantaneously, etc.  However, there are several problems:
- I haven't been able to instruct the agent to just download all my
  messages and be done with it.  I want it to maintain a local mirror
  of what's on the IMAP server.  It gets confused, so that some
  messages appear in the Summary buffer but aren't on the IMAP
  server--when I try to view them, I get error messages like "Can't
  view message 1234!"  These messages also can't be deleted.  Yet the
  agent insists that they're there.  The only thing that seems to help
  is clearing the Agent cache directory.
- The agent gets confused about flags.  This may be an honest-to-god
  bug, which I've discussed on the gnus mailing list
- It's not clear to me after several passes through the manual what
  the difference is between agent expiration and and "regular"
  expiration.  I subscribe to several mailing lists and have gnus
  expiration set up to keep two weeks worth of messages then delete
  them unless I've marked them somehow.  If I always read mail via the
  agent and use 'J s' to synchronize my local copies to the server,
  will these expirations ever take place?

That's pretty longwinded, but I hope that the collective experience on
the mailing list can provide some tips.  Have other people run into
these things?  Has anything worked to fix them?  The main thing, I
guess is the speed and the seeming flakiness of the connection to the
IMAP server.  All the business with the agent was just an attempt to
solve the speed problem.  Is there some other way?

Thanks a bunch, 
Greg