Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

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This is a great setup. I used to have the same configuration, but ended up replacing Gnus with Notmuch.

I'm far from a Gnus guru, so perhaps I'm missing something, but why do you prefer Gnus to Notmuch or Mu4e?

IMHO Notmuch has a very clear MUA model. Plus it's extremely fast and simple. Everything is done via tags. Notmuch never ever touches your email. This is the task of a backend, which has to translate tag changes into Mailbox actions. I do this using a few trivial Bash one-liners, which accommodate for Gmail's unusual IMAP implementation.

Mu4e is more similar to Mutt, as it does touch email directly, allowing you to move emails across folders or delete them. I also found the interface a little bit less snappy than Notmuch.

Gnus has some great ideas, but it's quite slow and the internals are a mess. It needs some serious refactoring.

I haven't researched Notmuch, but I've heard some interesting things about it. I used to use Mutt back in the day. Whatever I use would have to have Org integration, though.

Tbh, I just haven't researched other things and I haven't had the time. But Gnus does seem to fit well how I organize my mail: I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists, each of which are filtered into their own folders via Sieve scripts, before they touch my MUA. I also organize normal mail similarly.

Yes, I used to deal with email like that. Gnus + Dovecot + Sieve.

I find Notmuch + mbsync more satisfying because of efficiency and simplicity. It's a serverless setup, config files are small, and it's very quick.

Both Notmuch and Mu4e have good Org integration, so if you want to explore that route it shouldn't be a show-stopper.

This is a late reply, but thanks for your input. I'll look into them further. What interests me is your replacing Dovecot + Sieve with your MUA; I'll have to see if I want to do that or not.

No worries. For some time, before fully transitioning to Notmuch as a MUA, I was running Gnus with just Notmuch (using nnir notmuch search backend). So no Dovecot or Sieve. A pure Maildir.

I'm not sure whether you'd loose any feature like this, I don't think I did. But perhaps it's much simpler and quicker to switch to Notmuch for Emacs.

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