Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Hi Matt, Matt Lundin m...@imapmail.org writes: Certainly! These are the settings I have: I'm using this now and it works well, thanks a lot! -- Bastien
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Hi Matt, Matt Lundin m...@imapmail.org writes: I've configured gnus to sort subscribed groups automatically by the number of times accessed, with the least read groups falling to the bottom. This is interesting: could you share this bit of configuration? Thanks! -- Bastien
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Hi Bastien, Bastien Guerry b...@gnu.org writes: Hi Matt, Matt Lundin m...@imapmail.org writes: I've configured gnus to sort subscribed groups automatically by the number of times accessed, with the least read groups falling to the bottom. This is interesting: could you share this bit of configuration? Certainly! These are the settings I have: --8---cut here---start-8--- (setq gnus-group-sort-function 'gnus-group-sort-by-rank) (add-hook 'gnus-summary-exit-hook 'gnus-summary-bubble-group) (add-hook 'gnus-suspend-gnus-hook 'gnus-group-sort-groups-by-rank) (add-hook 'gnus-exit-gnus-hook 'gnus-group-sort-groups-by-rank) --8---cut here---end---8--- This causes gnus to bump up (bubble) the score of a group each time you read it. Then, whenever you exit or suspend gnus, all the groups will be sorted according to their a) level and b) score (i.e., the number of times read). All memory of a group's score will be wiped out if you unsubscribe or kill the group. Initially, I tried to add gnus-group-sort-by-rank to gnus-summary-exit-hook, but I seem to remember that it interfered too much with navigating the summary buffer. Here's the relevant section of the manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Group-Score.html#Group-Score There may be something else in my config file that makes this work, so feel free to let me know if the settings above don't produce the results you expect. Matt
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Hi, Eric Abrahamsen e...@ericabrahamsen.net writes: Rasmus ras...@gmx.us writes: Eric Abrahamsen e...@ericabrahamsen.net writes: It's not trivial when you live in China :) I can make it work, between alternate IP addresses and ssh tunnels, but it involves a lot of cursing and grinding my teeth. In a hostile network environment any client will face the same problems, but the lack of threading becomes pretty apparent here. I don't know what the great firewall is like, but for hostile networks around here (universities blocking git, airports blocking smtp/imap etc), I use openvpn. Are commercial openvpn provides blocked in China? Both commercial providers, and non-commercial providers! I set up my own OpenVPN server on a US server, and that worked for a couple of years. Then they caught it, and I switched to a non-standard port. That worked for another four months or so, and now it doesn't work on any port. I'm sure OpenVPN traffic is pretty easily sniffable. But what if you use TCP 443? That should be hard to detect, though speed might not be great... I guess https is OK in China. First link from startpage.com: https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/5919/how-to-hide-openvpn-traffic-an-introduction/ My next project is ipsec (another broken-leg project). But I figure, if I can google up these solutions, so can they, and the packet signatures of all these different systems must be quite identifiable. Isn't ipsec as less popular version of Tor? BTW: I tried Tor again in the weekend since a relative was asking about it. Speed seems to have gotten a lot better (I'm in EU). Using vanilla ssh seems fairly reliable: for the time being, I don't think they'd go so far as to block ssh across the board. That would really be declaring war on the internet. So sshuttle, tunnels, and the built-in ssh SOCKS proxy are serving me well. Using dnscrypt-proxy actually solves many of the problems -- in years past, it would have solved everything, but they've started hell-banning IP ranges, and of course that includes gmail. My own dumb fault for using gmail, I guess. The problem for me with socks is that it doesn't allow arbitrary port connections (I mostly deal with bad network configs, e.g. closed XMPP or git ports). How off-topic can we get? :) It's interesting. And +30°C. It's fin! Thanks for sharing! Rasmus -- May the Force be with you
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Rasmus ras...@gmx.us writes: Hi, Eric Abrahamsen e...@ericabrahamsen.net writes: Rasmus ras...@gmx.us writes: Eric Abrahamsen e...@ericabrahamsen.net writes: It's not trivial when you live in China :) I can make it work, between alternate IP addresses and ssh tunnels, but it involves a lot of cursing and grinding my teeth. In a hostile network environment any client will face the same problems, but the lack of threading becomes pretty apparent here. I don't know what the great firewall is like, but for hostile networks around here (universities blocking git, airports blocking smtp/imap etc), I use openvpn. Are commercial openvpn provides blocked in China? Both commercial providers, and non-commercial providers! I set up my own OpenVPN server on a US server, and that worked for a couple of years. Then they caught it, and I switched to a non-standard port. That worked for another four months or so, and now it doesn't work on any port. I'm sure OpenVPN traffic is pretty easily sniffable. But what if you use TCP 443? That should be hard to detect, though speed might not be great... I guess https is OK in China. First link from startpage.com: https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/5919/how-to-hide-openvpn-traffic-an-introduction/ Oh, interesting! Let me fire up my ssh tunnel so I can open the link... Okay, that's really useful, I'll try some of these solutions, thank you. I'll admit I'm often too impatient to sit down and do the research. startpage.com is nice, but it looks like they've already found that. I'm using search.disconnect.me, which is great, and so far open. My next project is ipsec (another broken-leg project). But I figure, if I can google up these solutions, so can they, and the packet signatures of all these different systems must be quite identifiable. Isn't ipsec as less popular version of Tor? BTW: I tried Tor again in the weekend since a relative was asking about it. Speed seems to have gotten a lot better (I'm in EU). I don't think it's like Tor, as in I don't think it's P2P. I tried Tor a couple of years ago and it was unusably slow -- maybe it's time again. Using vanilla ssh seems fairly reliable: for the time being, I don't think they'd go so far as to block ssh across the board. That would really be declaring war on the internet. So sshuttle, tunnels, and the built-in ssh SOCKS proxy are serving me well. Using dnscrypt-proxy actually solves many of the problems -- in years past, it would have solved everything, but they've started hell-banning IP ranges, and of course that includes gmail. My own dumb fault for using gmail, I guess. The problem for me with socks is that it doesn't allow arbitrary port connections (I mostly deal with bad network configs, e.g. closed XMPP or git ports). I only use socks for sending email, so it works fine. I've ended up with multiple concurrent solutions, which doesn't bother me too much. But if I could get openvpn back online, I'd like to just use that. If I could set up some sort of selective tunneling, based on a whitelist of hosts, that would be nice... How off-topic can we get? :) It's interesting. And +30°C. It's fin! Thanks for sharing! Fun stuff! I'll report back with any surprising news.
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Eric Abrahamsen e...@ericabrahamsen.net writes: Peter Salazar cycleofs...@gmail.com writes: Like Fabrice, I also still process my email using the Gmail web interface. The only reason I want email within Emacs is so I can compose replies in a proper editor with all my keybindings. I tried Chrome's Edit with Emacs, but it loses line breaks when it sends the output from Emacs back to Gmail. So I prefer to write replies within Emacs. Since I only need a small fraction of my emails to go through Emacs, I set up mbsync to pull only my starred messages: Channel gmail-starred Master :gmail-remote:[Gmail]/Starred Slave :gmail-local:starred Create Both Expunge Both SyncState * If this is of interest to you I can share my setup. I agree that having email accessible locally is key to making Gnus usable. All my email is synced to local dovecot server, and Gnus accesses that -- no lag at all. Sending messages is still a big pain, though. I send using msmtp, and there's an add-on called msmtp-queue that would apparently allow Gnus to hand off messages instantly, but I've never spent the time to get it set up. I sure wish IMAP could handle both sending and receiving messages! Sending messages in Gnus is trival these days. It works out of the box when you add a X-Message-SMTP-Method header (and GCC for saving a copy to Sent). I use smtp server from GMX, my own mail server and Outlook (I've used google mail in the past). Rasmus -- It was you, Jezebel, it was you
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Rasmus ras...@gmx.us writes: Eric Abrahamsen e...@ericabrahamsen.net writes: Peter Salazar cycleofs...@gmail.com writes: Like Fabrice, I also still process my email using the Gmail web interface. The only reason I want email within Emacs is so I can compose replies in a proper editor with all my keybindings. I tried Chrome's Edit with Emacs, but it loses line breaks when it sends the output from Emacs back to Gmail. So I prefer to write replies within Emacs. Since I only need a small fraction of my emails to go through Emacs, I set up mbsync to pull only my starred messages: Channel gmail-starred Master :gmail-remote:[Gmail]/Starred Slave :gmail-local:starred Create Both Expunge Both SyncState * If this is of interest to you I can share my setup. I agree that having email accessible locally is key to making Gnus usable. All my email is synced to local dovecot server, and Gnus accesses that -- no lag at all. Sending messages is still a big pain, though. I send using msmtp, and there's an add-on called msmtp-queue that would apparently allow Gnus to hand off messages instantly, but I've never spent the time to get it set up. I sure wish IMAP could handle both sending and receiving messages! Sending messages in Gnus is trival these days. It works out of the box when you add a X-Message-SMTP-Method header (and GCC for saving a copy to Sent). I use smtp server from GMX, my own mail server and Outlook (I've used google mail in the past). It's not trivial when you live in China :) I can make it work, between alternate IP addresses and ssh tunnels, but it involves a lot of cursing and grinding my teeth. In a hostile network environment any client will face the same problems, but the lack of threading becomes pretty apparent here. Someday I will set up my own mail server, when I'm in bed with a broken leg, maybe. I have so many broken-leg projects waiting, I hate to think of what sort of accident I'd have to be in to get them all completed.
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Eric Abrahamsen e...@ericabrahamsen.net writes: It's not trivial when you live in China :) I can make it work, between alternate IP addresses and ssh tunnels, but it involves a lot of cursing and grinding my teeth. In a hostile network environment any client will face the same problems, but the lack of threading becomes pretty apparent here. I don't know what the great firewall is like, but for hostile networks around here (universities blocking git, airports blocking smtp/imap etc), I use openvpn. Are commercial openvpn provides blocked in China? Rasmus -- Dung makes an excellent fertilizer
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Rasmus ras...@gmx.us writes: Eric Abrahamsen e...@ericabrahamsen.net writes: It's not trivial when you live in China :) I can make it work, between alternate IP addresses and ssh tunnels, but it involves a lot of cursing and grinding my teeth. In a hostile network environment any client will face the same problems, but the lack of threading becomes pretty apparent here. I don't know what the great firewall is like, but for hostile networks around here (universities blocking git, airports blocking smtp/imap etc), I use openvpn. Are commercial openvpn provides blocked in China? Both commercial providers, and non-commercial providers! I set up my own OpenVPN server on a US server, and that worked for a couple of years. Then they caught it, and I switched to a non-standard port. That worked for another four months or so, and now it doesn't work on any port. I'm sure OpenVPN traffic is pretty easily sniffable. My next project is ipsec (another broken-leg project). But I figure, if I can google up these solutions, so can they, and the packet signatures of all these different systems must be quite identifiable. Using vanilla ssh seems fairly reliable: for the time being, I don't think they'd go so far as to block ssh across the board. That would really be declaring war on the internet. So sshuttle, tunnels, and the built-in ssh SOCKS proxy are serving me well. Using dnscrypt-proxy actually solves many of the problems -- in years past, it would have solved everything, but they've started hell-banning IP ranges, and of course that includes gmail. My own dumb fault for using gmail, I guess. How off-topic can we get? :)
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
On this thread, I will report quite a different user experience. I have been a long time user of emacs and Gnus (Emacs since 1987). I have been using (ding) Gnus under Windows NT in the late 90's and up to about 2010. But now, I process my mail using the GMail browser interface. The reasons are mostly due to : - emacs is slow, chrome displays email more precisely and more quickly - emacs is not multi-threaded, hence it may get stuck processing stuff. Using the browser to process mail allows me not to be disturbed when I'm writing documents or programming using Emacs. I'll keep and eye on the solutions that have been reported here though. Best regards, Fabrice
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Fabrice Popineau fabrice.popin...@supelec.fr writes: That last feature alone is reason enough for me. FWIW, I'm on a Mac, and I generally use Gnu emacs for editing, programming, etc., and use Aquamacs for running gnus. This avoids any latency problems, etc. So you are running 2 instances of Emacs. This is what I considered for a moment :-) I typically run three Emacs servers. One for editing, one for Gnus and one for EMMS. I change the icon, title and background color based on the purpose of the instance. Rasmus -- May the Force be with you
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 02:35:57PM +0200, Nicolas Richard wrote: Peter Davis p...@pfdstudio.com writes: 2) I need a decent editor for replies. I have not found a browser-based client that has this. Firefox has an extension, https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/its-all-text/, which allows you to edit any text in your favourite editor (aka emacs) with emacsclient. Doesn't work anymore with Gmail. https://github.com/docwhat/itsalltext/issues/36 -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Fabrice Popineau fabrice.popin...@supelec.fr writes: On this thread, I will report quite a different user experience. I have been a long time user of emacs and Gnus (Emacs since 1987). I have been using (ding) Gnus under Windows NT in the late 90's and up to about 2010. But now, I process my mail using the GMail browser interface. The reasons are mostly due to : - emacs is slow, chrome displays email more precisely and more quickly - emacs is not multi-threaded, hence it may get stuck processing stuff. Using the browser to process mail allows me not to be disturbed when I'm writing documents or programming using Emacs. I'll keep and eye on the solutions that have been reported here though. Interesting. I use a variety of email clients, mainly browser-based ones (GMail, Fastmail), Thunderbird, and gnus. I keep gnus in the arsenal for three main reasons: 1) I can do everything quickly without having to move my hands from the keyboard. If there isn't already a shortcut for what I want, I can add one. 2) I need a decent editor for replies. I have not found a browser-based client that has this. 3) To bring this somewhat back on topic, I've recently discovered org capture, and I love the fact that I can capture a note with a link to a specific email message. That last feature alone is reason enough for me. FWIW, I'm on a Mac, and I generally use Gnu emacs for editing, programming, etc., and use Aquamacs for running gnus. This avoids any latency problems, etc. -pd
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Peter Davis p...@pfdstudio.com writes: 2) I need a decent editor for replies. I have not found a browser-based client that has this. Firefox has an extension, https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/its-all-text/, which allows you to edit any text in your favourite editor (aka emacs) with emacsclient. -- Nico
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
2015-08-11 14:23 GMT+02:00 Peter Davis p...@pfdstudio.com: 2) I need a decent editor for replies. I have not found a browser-based client that has this. Agreed. The biggest problem arises when you need to format code. There is an edit with emacs extension for chrome which is working quite well. That last feature alone is reason enough for me. FWIW, I'm on a Mac, and I generally use Gnu emacs for editing, programming, etc., and use Aquamacs for running gnus. This avoids any latency problems, etc. So you are running 2 instances of Emacs. This is what I considered for a moment :-) Fabrice
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Hi, I'm very happy with mu4e! http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html https://github.com/djcb/mu Its speed and ease in searching are unparalleled: the results of searches in tens of thousands of mails is immediate. I like its concepts of generating folders only virtually through searches: everything is search. The only lag that might occur is during sending. Yet by using, not the SMTP implementation that comes with emacs but a local postfix installation or something like nullmailer: http://vxlabs.com/2014/06/06/configuring-emacs-mu4e-with-nullmailer-offlineimap-and-multiple-identities mail is taken over in the background and no time is lost. mu4e (an its database backend mu) work on local copies of mail (sync'ed e.g. by offlineimap). In conjunction with offlineimap interfacing with Gmail is easy and well documented. Gerald. On Di, Aug 11 2015, Fabrice Popineau fabrice.popin...@supelec.fr wrote: On this thread, I will report quite a different user experience. I have been a long time user of emacs and Gnus (Emacs since 1987). I have been using (ding) Gnus under Windows NT in the late 90's and up to about 2010. But now, I process my mail using the GMail browser interface. The reasons are mostly due to : - emacs is slow, chrome displays email more precisely and more quickly - emacs is not multi-threaded, hence it may get stuck processing stuff. Using the browser to process mail allows me not to be disturbed when I'm writing documents or programming using Emacs. I'll keep and eye on the solutions that have been reported here though. Best regards, Fabrice
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Scott Randby sran...@gmail.com writes: On 08/11/2015 08:23 AM, Peter Davis wrote: 2) I need a decent editor for replies. I have not found a browser-based client that has this. For me, setting up any of the Emacs email clients to work properly with my various email tasks is a daunting task. This especially true for my work email account which is not a Gmail account. I simply don't have the technical knowledge to get everything working, and I don't have the time to acquire that technical knowledge. This has certainly been the case for me with gnus. I spent years (literally) playing with gnus and giving up, only to be drawn back to it weeks, months or years later to try again. Seriously, it was only after years of this that I managed to get things working well enough to actually use gnus, and even at that I only use it with IMAP. FWIW, I also used VM for a while (easier to configure, but much less powerful), MH-E, Wanderlust as well as non-Emacs clients (Sylpheed, mutt, Thunderbird, and others.) It's a crowded field. I generally liked some things about each of these, and disliked others. There's no perfect solution. One of the persistent frustrations for me with Thunderbird is that it still, even years after the problem was reported, can't get the unread counts correct for various folders all the time. It frequently shows unread counts for folders that have no unread messages, and vice versa. I get hundreds of messages a day, so I like to just be able to plow through them quickly, replying as needed, flagging some for later attention, etc. Mutt was actually the fastest for that, but I hate the way it displays HTML messages with w3m in dump mode. Mutt is also pretty challenging to configure, and that has to be re-created for each new machine. With gnus, I just copy my .gnus.el file over and, bam, done. -pd
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 5:16 PM, Peter Davis p...@pfdstudio.com wrote: spent years (literally) playing with gnus and giving up, only to be drawn back to it weeks, months or years later to try again. Seriously, it was only after years of this that I managed to get things working well enough to actually use gnus, and even at that I only use it with IMAP. Hehe this is *exactly* what i have experienced. im dying to move over to emacs for emails but so far both gnus and mu4e are giving me so many issues (and it may be that im just not smart enough to configure them properly). The latest i tried was setting up gnus via imap (gmail ) which worked for approximately 2 hours before getting errors and making me (once again..) give up and crawl back defeated to gmail :) plus the fact that i need a separate emacs session just for mail and all other small quirks in gnus are kind of a pain to setup (at least it seems so). mu4e seemed so promising but for me it seems that no matter what i do i cant get the headers to auto refresh when i get a new email which is driving me crazy so had to give up on that. Z
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
On 08/11/2015 10:16 AM, Peter Davis wrote: One of the persistent frustrations for me with Thunderbird is that it still, even years after the problem was reported, can't get the unread counts correct for various folders all the time. It frequently shows unread counts for folders that have no unread messages, and vice versa. I know this is way off topic, but I've not experienced the unread messages bug with Thunderbird (fortunately). This might be due to the fact that I use POP instead of IMAP, or perhaps it may be because my daily email traffic is rather small (mostly messages from this list). My biggest beef with Thunderbird is that it doesn't follow the preferences I've set for news feeds. Scott
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
On 08/11/2015 08:23 AM, Peter Davis wrote: 2) I need a decent editor for replies. I have not found a browser-based client that has this. For me, setting up any of the Emacs email clients to work properly with my various email tasks is a daunting task. This especially true for my work email account which is not a Gmail account. I simply don't have the technical knowledge to get everything working, and I don't have the time to acquire that technical knowledge. As a result, I use Thunderbird for all of my email and feed reading tasks. Thunderbird is trivial for me to set up, it is very easy to use, and I can still use Emacs for writing and editing email (as I'm doing now) with the External Editor add-on (http://globs.org/). Scott Randby 3) To bring this somewhat back on topic, I've recently discovered org capture, and I love the fact that I can capture a note with a link to a specific email message. That last feature alone is reason enough for me. FWIW, I'm on a Mac, and I generally use Gnu emacs for editing, programming, etc., and use Aquamacs for running gnus. This avoids any latency problems, etc. -pd
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Fabrice Popineau fabrice.popin...@supelec.fr writes: On this thread, I will report quite a different user experience. I have been a long time user of emacs and Gnus (Emacs since 1987). I have been using (ding) Gnus under Windows NT in the late 90's and up to about 2010. But now, I process my mail using the GMail browser interface. The reasons are mostly due to : - emacs is slow, chrome displays email more precisely and more quickly - emacs is not multi-threaded, hence it may get stuck processing stuff. Just to add my own off-topic contribution to this thread... I've found that gnus has sped up a good deal since 2010. I believe there have been some optimizatons in the code in the last several years. It takes about 5 seconds to start gnus on my under-powered machine, and that is with 4 nntp accounts (including rss via gwene.org), 2 email backends, and far too many groups! :) And this is with a lot of sorting and mail splitting. E.g., I've configured gnus to sort subscribed groups automatically by the number of times accessed, with the least read groups falling to the bottom. In my own experience (YMMV), I find the speed gain of navigating mail and news in gnus makes up for the brief lock-ups caused by (re)starting gnus or accessing a very large nntp group. I particularly appreciate the ability to insert the text of attachments into the buffer (via docx2txt, antiword, pdftotext, etc.) and to clip their contents into org-mode. Matt
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Peter Salazar cycleofs...@gmail.com writes: Like Fabrice, I also still process my email using the Gmail web interface. The only reason I want email within Emacs is so I can compose replies in a proper editor with all my keybindings. I tried Chrome's Edit with Emacs, but it loses line breaks when it sends the output from Emacs back to Gmail. So I prefer to write replies within Emacs. Since I only need a small fraction of my emails to go through Emacs, I set up mbsync to pull only my starred messages: Channel gmail-starred Master :gmail-remote:[Gmail]/Starred Slave :gmail-local:starred Create Both Expunge Both SyncState * If this is of interest to you I can share my setup. I agree that having email accessible locally is key to making Gnus usable. All my email is synced to local dovecot server, and Gnus accesses that -- no lag at all. Sending messages is still a big pain, though. I send using msmtp, and there's an add-on called msmtp-queue that would apparently allow Gnus to hand off messages instantly, but I've never spent the time to get it set up. I sure wish IMAP could handle both sending and receiving messages! E On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Peter Davis p...@pfdstudio.com wrote: Fabrice Popineau fabrice.popin...@supelec.fr writes: On this thread, I will report quite a different user experience. I have been a long time user of emacs and Gnus (Emacs since 1987). I have been using (ding) Gnus under Windows NT in the late 90's and up to about 2010. But now, I process my mail using the GMail browser interface. The reasons are mostly due to : - emacs is slow, chrome displays email more precisely and more quickly - emacs is not multi-threaded, hence it may get stuck processing stuff. Using the browser to process mail allows me not to be disturbed when I'm writing documents or programming using Emacs. I'll keep and eye on the solutions that have been reported here though. Interesting. I use a variety of email clients, mainly browser-based ones (GMail, Fastmail), Thunderbird, and gnus. I keep gnus in the arsenal for three main reasons: 1) I can do everything quickly without having to move my hands from the keyboard. If there isn't already a shortcut for what I want, I can add one. 2) I need a decent editor for replies. I have not found a browser-based client that has this. 3) To bring this somewhat back on topic, I've recently discovered org capture, and I love the fact that I can capture a note with a link to a specific email message. That last feature alone is reason enough for me. FWIW, I'm on a Mac, and I generally use Gnu emacs for editing, programming, etc., and use Aquamacs for running gnus. This avoids any latency problems, etc. -pd
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Like Fabrice, I also still process my email using the Gmail web interface. The only reason I want email within Emacs is so I can compose replies in a proper editor with all my keybindings. I tried Chrome's Edit with Emacs, but it loses line breaks when it sends the output from Emacs back to Gmail. So I prefer to write replies within Emacs. Since I only need a small fraction of my emails to go through Emacs, I set up mbsync to pull only my starred messages: Channel gmail-starred Master :gmail-remote:[Gmail]/Starred Slave :gmail-local:starred Create Both Expunge Both SyncState * If this is of interest to you I can share my setup. On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Peter Davis p...@pfdstudio.com wrote: Fabrice Popineau fabrice.popin...@supelec.fr writes: On this thread, I will report quite a different user experience. I have been a long time user of emacs and Gnus (Emacs since 1987). I have been using (ding) Gnus under Windows NT in the late 90's and up to about 2010. But now, I process my mail using the GMail browser interface. The reasons are mostly due to : - emacs is slow, chrome displays email more precisely and more quickly - emacs is not multi-threaded, hence it may get stuck processing stuff. Using the browser to process mail allows me not to be disturbed when I'm writing documents or programming using Emacs. I'll keep and eye on the solutions that have been reported here though. Interesting. I use a variety of email clients, mainly browser-based ones (GMail, Fastmail), Thunderbird, and gnus. I keep gnus in the arsenal for three main reasons: 1) I can do everything quickly without having to move my hands from the keyboard. If there isn't already a shortcut for what I want, I can add one. 2) I need a decent editor for replies. I have not found a browser-based client that has this. 3) To bring this somewhat back on topic, I've recently discovered org capture, and I love the fact that I can capture a note with a link to a specific email message. That last feature alone is reason enough for me. FWIW, I'm on a Mac, and I generally use Gnu emacs for editing, programming, etc., and use Aquamacs for running gnus. This avoids any latency problems, etc. -pd
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
I also just installed notmuch, in addition to mu4e, and so far I quite like notmuch. The interface so far is a little more intuitive (with mu4e, for instance, I kept getting tripped up hitting r to reply to a message and finding that it's bound to something else). I did get offlineimap working, but I decided to switch to mbsync, which is also working quite well. Let me know if you need pointers on setting it up. On the topic of Emacs email, does anyone know how to set message-citation-line-function so that replying doesn't quote/cite the original message at all? On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte rdia...@gmail.com wrote: You have received several great answers already, but my 2 cents here. I've used mu4e with offlineimap[1] for about three years now, and I am reasonably happy with it. I particularly like the search capabilities (which I now often complement with helm-mu). Setting it up was not particularly hard (and how to configure for gmail was just a matter of following the documentation), and I do not recall experiencing any of the issues you mention (I had a few others, but they have disappeared over versions). Before that, I used wanderlust with offlineimap, and I also liked it a lot (I think I got this to work from emacs-fu, the blog of mu4e's author). Initial configuration wasn't really harder than mu4e (I think I quickly found how to configure gmail by googling around). In fact, if you are used to the gmail way of doing things, wanderlust might be more familiar; for example, placing the same email in several folders, or however you want to call them, or being shown the folder structure with options to collapse/expand easily. Now, I actually prefer mu4e's approach most of the time and don't care much about the folder structure (I search and find; no need to try to recall where I filed a message). Actually, to me, overall, wanderlust just seemed easier to use[2], and many of the defaults made a lot more sense to me (i.e., with wanderlust I had to google around less to find how to do what I wanted and I added less code to my .emacs). That said, I haven't made any serious change to my mu4e configuration in over two years, I think, so it is well amortized. I switched to mu4e because I was using wanderlust but searching for/within emails with mu so I figured I might just do the full switch; as well, development and activity around mu4e seemed, well, much more active. In terms of checking email with gmail from other devices (tablet, phone): I very rarely do so, but when I've needed to I've never had an issue while using wanderlust + offlineimap or mu4e + offlineimap. Things work the way I expect (changes in gmail if checked from my tablet show up in my computer and viceversa). Of course, checking email from multiple computers has no problems whatsoever. Finally, even if setting email with emacs was not a half hour thing, I am really glad I did so [3]. Best, R. [1] Offlineimap is slow, and has other issues. I searched for alternatives two or three years ago, and did not find anything convincing (e.g., see this resignated summary http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/08/offlineimap-sucks/ from a few years ago). After Titus' answer, I might give mbsync a try, since now encrypted passwords are supported, etc. [2] This is, of course, just my experience (or my incompetence). For example, with mu4e I had to search around to find how to get a reasonable way to add the date of the original message to the reply or forward but it worked just fine for me with wanderlust. I still struggle with address completion and blacklist in mu4e whereas address completion in wanderlust with BBDB always did exactly what I wanted. Or when I started using mu4e I missed a lot from wanderlust the C-c C-j that allows you to choose account to send from. In all fairness this is also available for mu4e (http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e/Multiple-accounts.html) but requires you to add some extra code. [3] Why? I find the web interface of gmail slow to navigate, cumbersome, and bloated. I also used kmail which was, well, OK, but it was not the editor/environment I use for everything else (for a while, I used kmail but used emacsclient for email writing) and searching was not what it is with mu4e or helm-mu. On Thu, 06-08-2015, at 14:43, Xebar Saram zelt...@gmail.com wrote: Hi list I know this is a bit off topic but im desperately looking for some advice regarding email through emacs. i have tried a bunch of them over the last month (gnus, mu4e, wanderlust, rmail,mew and maybe other i forget). I had various levels of success with each one to setup (it was never easy) but i ended up sorta settling on mu4e. the problem is that mu4e never managed to work properly for me (headers were not updating when new mail arrived, reply was broken etc) so i had to give up What i want is basically pretty simple. an easy to setup
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
I am a happy mu4e + offlineimap user since January. Gmail is my mail server, and I also check mail by phone, tablet, sometimes browser. I run on a Mac with no issues so far. I would guess you could get a similar setup on Linux easily enough. I never got a good solution on Windows. To be fair, I have it set up to only update every 20 minutes, which I like, and I can force it to update when I want, or sometimes I switch to a browser at times where I need real-time updates. Most of the time I don't want that though! I did hack some things to get it more like the gmail experience I am accustomed to like archiving, and I did hack a function to remove myself from replies. (defun remove-kitchin-emails () Removes me from the CC list. I do not need my own emails that I send. (interactive) (message-goto-cc) (save-restriction (let ((end (point)) (start)) (beginning-of-line) (setq start (point)) (narrow-to-region start end) (mapc (lambda (email-to-remove) (beginning-of-line) (when (re-search-forward email-to-remove nil t) (replace-match ))) '(John Kitchin jkitc...@andrew.cmu.edu,? John Kitchin johnrkitc...@gmail.com,? jkitc...@cmu.edu, jkitc...@andrew.cmu.edu, johnrkitc...@gmail.com,? (message-goto-to) (when (message-field-value To) (message-goto-body))) ;; append and make local (add-hook 'mu4e-compose-mode-hook 'remove-kitchin-emails t) I also built a helm-contacts completion tool that is better than the completion I could use out of the box. Anyway, it took a while to get what I wanted, but I have hardly any complaints about it now that it works! Xebar Saram writes: Hi list I know this is a bit off topic but im desperately looking for some advice regarding email through emacs. i have tried a bunch of them over the last month (gnus, mu4e, wanderlust, rmail,mew and maybe other i forget). I had various levels of success with each one to setup (it was never easy) but i ended up sorta settling on mu4e. the problem is that mu4e never managed to work properly for me (headers were not updating when new mail arrived, reply was broken etc) so i had to give up What i want is basically pretty simple. an easy to setup email for emacs, but one that would work tightly with gmail since i do a lot of mail checking on the road via my cellphone. any advise. recommendations or setups that maybe people are willing to share? thx so much in advance Z -- Professor John Kitchin Doherty Hall A207F Department of Chemical Engineering Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 412-268-7803 @johnkitchin http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
On Thu, Aug 06, 2015 at 08:21:15PM +0300, Xebar Saram wrote: thank so much everyone for your great tips and comments you gave me more energy to further pursue gnus and or mu4e There is also notmuch. In fact, notmuch seems to have an edge over mu4e when it comes to performance, at least that's my understanding. I would like to say something though. I think you should not blindly keep on trying all these options, that would probably end up in frustration all over again. First you need to answer, how you use email, how do you want to access it, and what kind of features do you want. You shouldn't limit yourself to Emacs either. Eventhough Emacs can do many things, often there are other tools which are better suited. - Email could be a means for discussions, in that case it's a reference - Then you might want searchability, or someway to refer back to messages. - It could be a todo list for you, in that case you want some way to filter and carry over your emails to your todo lists. - Do you want filtering for other purposes? - You might want access to your emails over IMAP (it's immediate), or available locally (always there, not immediate). - Local disk space constraints. - Do you want access to your emails from multiple interfaces? - Do you prefer using the terminal or a GUI? As you see, there are lots of points to think about. Hope this helps, -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
You have received several great answers already, but my 2 cents here. I've used mu4e with offlineimap[1] for about three years now, and I am reasonably happy with it. I particularly like the search capabilities (which I now often complement with helm-mu). Setting it up was not particularly hard (and how to configure for gmail was just a matter of following the documentation), and I do not recall experiencing any of the issues you mention (I had a few others, but they have disappeared over versions). Before that, I used wanderlust with offlineimap, and I also liked it a lot (I think I got this to work from emacs-fu, the blog of mu4e's author). Initial configuration wasn't really harder than mu4e (I think I quickly found how to configure gmail by googling around). In fact, if you are used to the gmail way of doing things, wanderlust might be more familiar; for example, placing the same email in several folders, or however you want to call them, or being shown the folder structure with options to collapse/expand easily. Now, I actually prefer mu4e's approach most of the time and don't care much about the folder structure (I search and find; no need to try to recall where I filed a message). Actually, to me, overall, wanderlust just seemed easier to use[2], and many of the defaults made a lot more sense to me (i.e., with wanderlust I had to google around less to find how to do what I wanted and I added less code to my .emacs). That said, I haven't made any serious change to my mu4e configuration in over two years, I think, so it is well amortized. I switched to mu4e because I was using wanderlust but searching for/within emails with mu so I figured I might just do the full switch; as well, development and activity around mu4e seemed, well, much more active. In terms of checking email with gmail from other devices (tablet, phone): I very rarely do so, but when I've needed to I've never had an issue while using wanderlust + offlineimap or mu4e + offlineimap. Things work the way I expect (changes in gmail if checked from my tablet show up in my computer and viceversa). Of course, checking email from multiple computers has no problems whatsoever. Finally, even if setting email with emacs was not a half hour thing, I am really glad I did so [3]. Best, R. [1] Offlineimap is slow, and has other issues. I searched for alternatives two or three years ago, and did not find anything convincing (e.g., see this resignated summary http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/08/offlineimap-sucks/ from a few years ago). After Titus' answer, I might give mbsync a try, since now encrypted passwords are supported, etc. [2] This is, of course, just my experience (or my incompetence). For example, with mu4e I had to search around to find how to get a reasonable way to add the date of the original message to the reply or forward but it worked just fine for me with wanderlust. I still struggle with address completion and blacklist in mu4e whereas address completion in wanderlust with BBDB always did exactly what I wanted. Or when I started using mu4e I missed a lot from wanderlust the C-c C-j that allows you to choose account to send from. In all fairness this is also available for mu4e (http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e/Multiple-accounts.html) but requires you to add some extra code. [3] Why? I find the web interface of gmail slow to navigate, cumbersome, and bloated. I also used kmail which was, well, OK, but it was not the editor/environment I use for everything else (for a while, I used kmail but used emacsclient for email writing) and searching was not what it is with mu4e or helm-mu. On Thu, 06-08-2015, at 14:43, Xebar Saram zelt...@gmail.com wrote: Hi list I know this is a bit off topic but im desperately looking for some advice regarding email through emacs. i have tried a bunch of them over the last month (gnus, mu4e, wanderlust, rmail,mew and maybe other i forget). I had various levels of success with each one to setup (it was never easy) but i ended up sorta settling on mu4e. the problem is that mu4e never managed to work properly for me (headers were not updating when new mail arrived, reply was broken etc) so i had to give up What i want is basically pretty simple. an easy to setup email for emacs, but one that would work tightly with gmail since i do a lot of mail checking on the road via my cellphone. any advise. recommendations or setups that maybe people are willing to share? thx so much in advance Z -- Ramon Diaz-Uriarte Department of Biochemistry, Lab B-25 Facultad de Medicina Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Arzobispo Morcillo, 4 28029 Madrid Spain Phone: +34-91-497-2412 Email: rdia...@gmail.com ramon.d...@iib.uam.es http://ligarto.org/rdiaz
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Xebar Saram zelt...@gmail.com writes: Hi list I know this is a bit off topic but im desperately looking for some advice regarding email through emacs. i have tried a bunch of them over the last month (gnus, mu4e, wanderlust, rmail,mew and maybe other i forget). I had various levels of success with each one to setup (it was never easy) but i ended up sorta settling on mu4e. the problem is that mu4e never managed to work properly for me (headers were not updating when new mail arrived, reply was broken etc) so i had to give up What i want is basically pretty simple. an easy to setup email for emacs, but one that would work tightly with gmail since i do a lot of mail checking on the road via my cellphone. any advise. recommendations or setups that maybe people are willing to share? I don't know about mu4e, but there are lots of sites that discuss setting up gnus to work with GMail, including example files, etc. Just Google gnus gmail and you'll find many results. I'm using gnus with Fastmail.fm. It was difficult to set up initially, but once I got it working, it's been easy to maintain, move to new machines, etc. Also, I like the fact that I can keep finding new features and customizations to add. -pd
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Seconded. Mu4e is one of my favorite things in Emacs and makes a big difference in my professional life. Its search capabilities are similar to those offered by Gmail but Mu4e is faster and I don’t need to be online. I wrote helm-mu to optimize the search experience even further (gives you instant search results as you type): https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm-mu As an alternative to offlineimap, I recommend mbsync (also known as isync) which is faster and overall more mature and reliable. Titus On 2015-08-06 Thu 07:31, John Kitchin wrote: I am a happy mu4e + offlineimap user since January. Gmail is my mail server, and I also check mail by phone, tablet, sometimes browser. I run on a Mac with no issues so far. I would guess you could get a similar setup on Linux easily enough. I never got a good solution on Windows. To be fair, I have it set up to only update every 20 minutes, which I like, and I can force it to update when I want, or sometimes I switch to a browser at times where I need real-time updates. Most of the time I don't want that though! I did hack some things to get it more like the gmail experience I am accustomed to like archiving, and I did hack a function to remove myself from replies. (defun remove-kitchin-emails () Removes me from the CC list. I do not need my own emails that I send. (interactive) (message-goto-cc) (save-restriction (let ((end (point)) (start)) (beginning-of-line) (setq start (point)) (narrow-to-region start end) (mapc (lambda (email-to-remove) (beginning-of-line) (when (re-search-forward email-to-remove nil t) (replace-match ))) '(John Kitchin jkitc...@andrew.cmu.edu,? John Kitchin johnrkitc...@gmail.com,? jkitc...@cmu.edu, jkitc...@andrew.cmu.edu, johnrkitc...@gmail.com,? (message-goto-to) (when (message-field-value To) (message-goto-body))) ;; append and make local (add-hook 'mu4e-compose-mode-hook 'remove-kitchin-emails t) I also built a helm-contacts completion tool that is better than the completion I could use out of the box. Anyway, it took a while to get what I wanted, but I have hardly any complaints about it now that it works! Xebar Saram writes: Hi list I know this is a bit off topic but im desperately looking for some advice regarding email through emacs. i have tried a bunch of them over the last month (gnus, mu4e, wanderlust, rmail,mew and maybe other i forget). I had various levels of success with each one to setup (it was never easy) but i ended up sorta settling on mu4e. the problem is that mu4e never managed to work properly for me (headers were not updating when new mail arrived, reply was broken etc) so i had to give up What i want is basically pretty simple. an easy to setup email for emacs, but one that would work tightly with gmail since i do a lot of mail checking on the road via my cellphone. any advise. recommendations or setups that maybe people are willing to share? thx so much in advance Z signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
thank so much everyone for your great tips and comments you gave me more energy to further pursue gnus and or mu4e thanks again Z On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 7:50 PM, Titus von der Malsburg malsb...@posteo.de wrote: Seconded. Mu4e is one of my favorite things in Emacs and makes a big difference in my professional life. Its search capabilities are similar to those offered by Gmail but Mu4e is faster and I don’t need to be online. I wrote helm-mu to optimize the search experience even further (gives you instant search results as you type): https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm-mu As an alternative to offlineimap, I recommend mbsync (also known as isync) which is faster and overall more mature and reliable. Titus On 2015-08-06 Thu 07:31, John Kitchin wrote: I am a happy mu4e + offlineimap user since January. Gmail is my mail server, and I also check mail by phone, tablet, sometimes browser. I run on a Mac with no issues so far. I would guess you could get a similar setup on Linux easily enough. I never got a good solution on Windows. To be fair, I have it set up to only update every 20 minutes, which I like, and I can force it to update when I want, or sometimes I switch to a browser at times where I need real-time updates. Most of the time I don't want that though! I did hack some things to get it more like the gmail experience I am accustomed to like archiving, and I did hack a function to remove myself from replies. (defun remove-kitchin-emails () Removes me from the CC list. I do not need my own emails that I send. (interactive) (message-goto-cc) (save-restriction (let ((end (point)) (start)) (beginning-of-line) (setq start (point)) (narrow-to-region start end) (mapc (lambda (email-to-remove) (beginning-of-line) (when (re-search-forward email-to-remove nil t) (replace-match ))) '(John Kitchin jkitc...@andrew.cmu.edu,? John Kitchin johnrkitc...@gmail.com,? jkitc...@cmu.edu, jkitc...@andrew.cmu.edu, johnrkitc...@gmail.com,? (message-goto-to) (when (message-field-value To) (message-goto-body))) ;; append and make local (add-hook 'mu4e-compose-mode-hook 'remove-kitchin-emails t) I also built a helm-contacts completion tool that is better than the completion I could use out of the box. Anyway, it took a while to get what I wanted, but I have hardly any complaints about it now that it works! Xebar Saram writes: Hi list I know this is a bit off topic but im desperately looking for some advice regarding email through emacs. i have tried a bunch of them over the last month (gnus, mu4e, wanderlust, rmail,mew and maybe other i forget). I had various levels of success with each one to setup (it was never easy) but i ended up sorta settling on mu4e. the problem is that mu4e never managed to work properly for me (headers were not updating when new mail arrived, reply was broken etc) so i had to give up What i want is basically pretty simple. an easy to setup email for emacs, but one that would work tightly with gmail since i do a lot of mail checking on the road via my cellphone. any advise. recommendations or setups that maybe people are willing to share? thx so much in advance Z
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
On Thursday, 6 Aug 2015 at 15:43, Xebar Saram wrote: Hi list I know this is a bit off topic but im desperately looking for some advice regarding email through emacs. i have tried a bunch of them over the last month (gnus, mu4e, wanderlust, rmail,mew and maybe other i forget). I use gnus and have done so almost exclusively for a long time now. almost exclusively because I do read email on my phone now and again. gnus, like org, can do almost anything but does have a steep learning curve for some aspects. gnus works just fine with gmail. configuring for gmail is quite easy these days: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusGmail Maybe if you indicate what didn't work, we can try to help although you might get better response on the gnus mailing list: http://gnus.org/resources.html -- : Eric S Fraga (0xFFFCF67D), Emacs 25.0.50.2, Org release_8.3beta-1315-ga3b2b7
Re: [O] [OFF TOPIC] almost giving up on emacs email..looking for advice?
Xebar Saram writes: What i want is basically pretty simple. an easy to setup email for emacs, but one that would work tightly with gmail since i do a lot of mail checking on the road via my cellphone. any advise. recommendations or setups that maybe people are willing to share? The setup of gnus for gmail is quite simply: #+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp (setq gnus-select-method '(nnimap imap.gmail.com)) (setq smtpmail-default-smtp-server smtp.gmail.com) #+END_SRC and in ~/.authinfo.gpg: #+BEGIN_EXAMPLE machine imap.gmail.com login username password password port imap machine smtp.gmail.com login username password password port 587 #+END_EXAMPLE That is enough to get and check mail (M-x gnus) and send mail (C-x m). Since it is imap, nothing is kept locally so whatever you do in gnus is reflected on your phone and vice versa. One thing that bears mentioning is that gnus treats mail as news so it won't show you by default already read messages (like most mail apps), hit L to show all groups (as opposed to l for only groups with new messages) and enter the INBOX group to see all previous messages. Best, -- Jorge.
