Federico Sevilla III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> annoyed by having to go through pages worth of green lines (quotes are

Obligatory Emacs plug:

Use Emacs and Gnus, the built-in mail/newsreader, and never have to worry
about overquoted text again! ;) (I'm beginning to sound like spam).

No, seriously. Gnus has this feature called Article Hiding, and it
allows me to hide quoted text. Quite configurable - you can tell it to
hide quoted text unless the quoted text is one or two lines long, or
display the first A lines and the last B lines of long quoted text, or
whatever. You can easily unhide particular sections of text with
<enter> or a left-click, and a few keys can unhide all of the hidden
text (or some portions of it).

Gnus is really a mail/newsreader for people who are picky about
netiquette. For example, it can hide really long "To:" headers. It can
hide PGP keys, PEM data, and long signatures. It can get rid of
mailing list banners, which is a godsend when you're on a mailing list
with _really_ long boilerplate! It can hide the little [plug] in
subjects.

Article washing can also help make messages more readable. It can
capitalize the first word in each sentence. (What the heck?) It can
convert HTML to plain text. It can merge multiple blank lines, or
strip the blank lines altogether. Mmm, maybe I should look for a way to get
article washing to try and translate abbreviations. 

You can easily kill a thread and move on to the next one, or catch up
all your mail. And if you get _really_ annoyed, just permanently or
temporarily lower the sender's/subject's/thread's score. Mwahahaha! If
you like something, though, you can increase the score easily. No more
mucking about with configuration files - scoring is just a couple of
intuitive keystrokes away. In fact, with adaptive scoring, you don't
even need to manually do anything. Gnus learns your preferences -
which authors you read, what threads you like or don't like... Isn't
it cool? (Yes, you can turn this feature off, or tweak it, or replace
it, or whatever).

Gnus works with BBDB (database of contacts), and it can automatically
bring up the contact information of people associated with a
particular message. (Sender, recipient, cc, whatever). You can tell it
to automatically create records for people who write to you, annotate
records with notes, and generally do all sorts of funky stuff. You can
even tie BBDB into your scoring mechanism. For example, you can score
people depending on the total number of personal messages they've sent
to you... =)

Gnus also buttonizes text it recognizes. For example, if you press
<enter> on a link, you are taken to that website. If you press <enter>
on man(1), Emacs brings up the manual page for man. It can deal with
URLs, news, message IDs, mailto, info and man pages, and you can
easily expand it by customizing gnus-button-alist.

Gnus makes it easy to navigate a thread. Normally the summary only
shows unread mail, but you can hit ^ to retrieve an article's parent
or a few keystrokes to include the entire thread in the summary
buffer.

Gnus also probably has support for the little footnotes Jijo likes to
make. <muses> There's a footnote minor mode, anyway. If that won't
work, I can probably just fiddle with the buttons, or C-s my way to
the footnote. =)

Ahhhh, Emacs.

Yes, yes, mutt and pine have their purposes and they're really quite
nice. I used to be really into mutt. But Emacs is really something
else. <g>

-- 
Sacha Chua <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - 4 BS CS Ateneo geekette
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, wearables, teaching compsci
_
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