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

[Seth Falcon]

On 20 Jan 2006, address@hidden wrote:
> 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.

I switched to Gnus because of Planner as well.  It was a rather
painful transition, but I must say that I'm quite happy with Gnus at
this point.  I think it has helped me keep my head above water with
the flood of email that I receive.

[snip discussion of IMAP issues]

> Is there some other way?

I started off with an IMAP setup and was also frustrated by speed and
off-line cache issues.

Not wanting to give up IMAP, I went for a rather complex solution:

 - Installed dovcot, a small-ish IMAP server on my laptop (!)
 - Ran offlineimap, a clever IMAP sync program that can sync between
   IMAP servers.

This actually worked fairly well.  Gives you complete access to your
mail while off-line and good speed.  But it is really complicated.

Finally, I just gave up on IMAP and decided that I will almost always
access my mail from the same machine (laptop).  My current setup is:

 - Use fetchmail to pull everything off of the IMAP server via POP.
 - On the IMAP server I'm able to run procmail and have a copy of all
   mail sent to a gmail account for backup + online access if I need
   it.
 - Use Gnus nnml backend

This has been working well for me.  Gnus is noticably faster, I have
everything off-line.  It is simple enough that switching to a new
laptop wasn't a big deal, etc.

HTH,

+ seth