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From: Charles Sebold <csebold@ezl.com> Subject: Re: email in emacs Date: 07 Mar 2001 06:47:38 -0600 Cc: Fei Chen <feic@stats.ox.ac.uk> On 11 Adar 5761, Fei Chen wrote: > I'm a Pine user for email and have been considering converting to > using emacs. I have serveral question and any pointers would be much > appreciated. > > 1) I've heard of two package: RMAIL and mh-e, what are the > differences/advantage-disadvantages? If someone could point me to a > FAQ or www site it would be great. The most full-featured and currently supported email clients for Emacs are VM and Gnus. Emacs comes with an old version of Gnus; I recommend upgrading it if you use that. VM can be found at <URL:http://www.wonderworks.com/> Gnus can be found at <URL:http://www.gnus.org/> VM acts like a fairly normal email client for the most part; Gnus treats mail like news, which is nice if you like reading it that way. People tend to either love it or hate it. VM has been recently updated substantially to be compatible with Emacs 20; don't know how that effort is going but based on the headers I see it seems like it's going pretty well. Gnus is very compatible with Emacs 20 and the coming 21 and usually works very well with XEmacs as well. I have used both and ended up with Gnus (but this is probably because I was trying this back before VM had been updated for Emacs 20). They both have newsgroups or mailing lists that are very helpful, and the developers themselves often contribute. > 2) Is it pretty trivial to convert all my existing Pine folders into a > format an emacs mail package can read? Doesn't Pine use the Unix mbox format? Gnus can read that and VM uses that plus a special header for its native mailbox format. -- Charles Sebold Random Answer to an Emacs Very Frequently Asked Question: Try it with emacs -q --no-site-file to be sure that it isn't your .emacs. -- 12th of Adar, 5761 -- Daily Affirmation: I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.