Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[Loris Bennett]

Hi N,

nljlistbox2@gmail.com writes:

> I've been reading about getting email set up in Emacs for the past
> several months, but I haven't yet come upon a satisfactory solution
> for me. I have a few questions that I hope someone might answer.
>
> 1. Gnus: It has often been observed that mail and news are similar
> creatures, so that it makes sense to handle mail in a system built for
> handling news. Certainly there are similarities. However, when I've
> read a news article in Gnus, it disappears. That suits me well
> enough. But I don't want the mail in my inbox to disappear once it's
> been read. I'd like to be able to see both my read and unread mail in
> my inbox and have the two distinguished in some way. Doable? I'm
> guessing it is, but the second issue has precluded me looking up how
> to do it.

This is a common question:

http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_398.html#SEC451

However, you will probably end up doing this less often than you might
think.

> 2. Gnus again: As far as I've been able to ascertain (and of course I
> might be mistaken), Gnus does not support IMAP. To be sure it will
> download mail from an IMAP server (I have that set up already), but
> that is not my use case. I have my inboxes (the contents of which are
> retrieved from the outside world by fetchmail) and about twenty-years
> worth of filed mail in a local Dovecot IMAP server. I don't want my
> mail client (whatever I end up using) to make its own local copy of my
> mail -- I want it to allow me to read the mail in my IMAP inboxes,
> delete it on the rare occasions that I want to do that, or file it in
> other folders on the IMAP server. Did I miss something, or am I
> correct in thinking Gnus lacks the ability to interact with an IMAP
> server in that way?

Gnus does work with IMAP.  Look here:

http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_208.html

> 3. RMAIL: Again, can it interact with IMAP as above? The impression
> that I've reached is that RMAIL is adamant about having it's own local
> copy of things.

I haven't used RMAIL for years, but look here:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Remote-Mailboxes.html#Remote-Mailboxes

> 4. Mutt with Emacs as external editor: This is the solution I'm
> leaning towards, but I'll be sad if I can't get an all-Emacs solution
> working. (After all, I do almost everything else on my computer in
> Emacs.) Are there known pitfalls to using Mutt with Emacs?

This is probably possible.  However, it strikes me as a little bizarre
since there are solutions within Emacs

> Thank you to anyone with suggestions.
>
> N. Jackson.

Cheers,

Loris

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