Practical guide to using Gnus with Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Practical guide to using Gnus with Gmail

blog.binchen.org

38 pointslelf18 comments

I would love to use Gnus (I currently use mutt but increasingly love all things Emacs). The problem seems that memory baloons with even small modest maildirs, where mutt does as well but the memory consumption was far less by comparison. Also, the imap layer seemed quite slow.

I know this is anecdotal. But does anyone else know have counter experiences or tweaking recommendations? I sync maildirs with mbsync/isync and use notmuch. I could use the notmuch Emacs interface as well, but it does not do some delete operations and other things that require frequent access to raw maildir access (notmuch indexing will not delete maildir emails, but syncs all other flags). Mutt-kz (mutt with notmuch extensions) is pretty much my current sweet spot.

Anyone else where I am at? It is so hard to part with the efficiency and simplicity of mutt once you adapt.

mu4e is pretty good - http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

the configuration is a bit of a pain, but once you've gotten past the setup it's a very nice way to do your email from inside emacs

Funny you mention it. To be honest, I am not asking about the mail indexer clients in this space (mu4e and notmuch.el). However, to address your concern, mu4e had even worse memory consumption than notmuch (of course my opinion but I tried both of them on and off for the lat few months, and I have to admit indexing and Emacs client memory consumption notmuch was much better in my experience).

Anyway, still need direct access to maildirs because these indexing systems do not delete the email out of your maildirs. I need to spruce up every once in a while.

Thanks for the recommendation though.

I've been using mu4e for over a year now and have been very happy with it. For some reason I just couldn't get my head around GNUS workflow and concepts. mu4e just seemed more normal to me, but with great search.

I love mutt, and I'm really hoping mutt-kz replaces vanilla mutt. I think that mutt-kz + isync are a great mail suite.

I'm missing address completion a la gmail from notmuch, though. This is a feature mu (which can also be used as a backend, like notmuch) has implemented. I've never understood why notmuch always relied on ugly and slow hacks for this.

Incidentally, I type my emails in emacs, but I don't like using emacs as an os, so it's just my email composer.

I have a setup like that -- gmail imap, synced with isync, indexed with notmuch. Gnus' imap implementation has gotten much faster recently, and the notmuch integration is great. On the other hand, if you're liking mutt, why switch?

How do you handle contacts? I'd like to have a gmail-like setup i.e., autocomplete based on the people that I've written to or have written to me in the past.

There are some ugly hacks in notmuch to accomplish this, which I don't understand, since it should be quite easy to achieve. In fact mu provides it, and they both use xapian as a backend.

I use BBDB, the standard contact manager package. Version 3 is much better! It does all the autocompletion stuff you could want.

As far as I know there's no integration with notmuch, though. That's not too much of a problem, however, since the only thing you're missing there is the ability to create new contacts automatically from received messages. But you're almost certainly reading new messages in Gnus (where BBDB contact creation works), not in Notmuch.

Can it show addresses to autocomplete even if you don't have created contacts for them?

That's what I want to achieve, and what is currently possible with mu (and notmuch, but through an ugly hack).

I like treating contacts like favorites. I don't manage any, and let my email client / web browser handle them based on frequency.

No, BBDB doesn't maintain separate lists of "real contacts" and "seen addresses". On the other hand, contact creation is cheap, and can be totally automated to happen behind the scenes, without your involvement, so the effect can be similar.

Google nottoomuch. You and others asked, and like me, I felt pain when moving away from mu because it is built into the binary. These scripts allow you to cahce a contact list that scavenges the databses for all email addresses. You can ignore stuff and do other fun stuff with it.

(Disclosure: I am very happy user of these scripts.)

http://www.guru-group.fi/~too/nottoomuch/nottoomuch-addresse...

What I loved about Gnus the most was that, by default, once you read a mail you would never see it again. You could, of course, search through read mail, or tick the mail so it would remain visible, but doing nothing was the equivalent of archiving on Gmail. Before Gmail came around, this was an amazing way to handle mail.

I quit using Gnus about the time I quit reading Usenet. Gnus is too much for just mail. And now Gmail is around, which is good enough for me.

Wow people are still using Gnus. I think I stopped using it around around 2005. I think it was the best text only mail client but osx mail works better for me.

What I missed most from Gnus was good search.

Gnus HTML and inline image support is from earlier than 2005.

Eh, where was I talking about that?

"Text-only mail client"?

ah sorry, I meant it more as in a non traditional GUI program.

I just do not understand EMACS users. Use a mail application for mail and an editor as an editor. Look I know you can edit videos in EMACS even, but why would you want to?

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