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Emacs + gnus

Emacs + gnus

Posted Jun 17, 2004 3:54 UTC (Thu) by ssavitzky (subscriber, #2855)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to mail clients: introduction

Although gnus is billed as the standard emacs news reader, it's also a mail reader -- basically it makes an MH mail folder look like a news spool directory (which it really does anyway). The preferred backend adds a .overview database so it can track message IDs.

The current version of gnus handles MIME attachments (launching helper apps as needed). There is also a wide variety of backends including an RSS reader and a reader for mailing lists archived on the web. Have to try that soon.


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Emacs + gnus

Posted Jun 17, 2004 9:52 UTC (Thu) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link]

I like gnus a lot, but I'm not sure how to integrate it with anti-spam software, and I'm tired of configuring it via elisp. I want a program that mostly does the right thing without needing a lot of twiddling that might result in my mail being erased.

Emacs + gnus

Posted Jun 17, 2004 10:49 UTC (Thu) by mwh (subscriber, #582) [Link]

I use gnus for my mail, but I'm not entirely happy about it. It's great, fantastic for mailing list mail, but it's not perfect for personal stuff. I still haven't found something that I like, though. Mail.app is OK for when I'm on OS X.

I don't know how do integrate spam filtering into it, but that's because I do my filtering at delivery time (when God intended, etc).

Emacs + gnus + spam filtering?

Posted Jun 17, 2004 21:15 UTC (Thu) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link]

I had the idea that for "Bayesian" spam filtering to work properly, it was necessary for the user to train the spam filter, by deleting spam and flagging it as such. This operation would best be performed in the mail reader itself rather than as a separate option at delivery time. Or am I missing something?

training spam filter

Posted Jun 18, 2004 0:21 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I do my bayesian spam filtering (with bogofilter) on the server, and when
some spam gets by it I move that message to a special "spam" folder on
the server (via IMAP). I have a cron job on the server that goes through
that folder every hour to learn about new spam.

Emacs + gnus + spam filtering?

Posted Jun 19, 2004 0:52 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

the user does have to train it, but that training can be done in any number of ways.

Popfile is just getting an IMAP module that lets you train (and correct) the filter by just moving messages to the folder they are supposed to be in.

this sort of multiple access is one of the big advantages of IMAP (although I will admit that not that many people take advantage of it). unlike the other options you don't even have to have the various pieces on the same machine.

Emacs + gnus

Posted Jun 20, 2004 1:21 UTC (Sun) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122) [Link]

The current version of Gnus has all the interfaces and key-bindings for handling spams using various interfaces, one of them internal to Emacs and the others are external programs that you'd use (like bogofilter, spamassassin, etc). Check with it.

Emacs + gnus

Posted Jun 18, 2004 19:46 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Yes, I thought gnus was for news. I use it for that, but I use rmail for mail, because I thought I was supposed to. Do you know how they compare?

Why does Emacs come with both rmail and gnus (or does it?). And doesn't gnus violate the Unix one-program-one-function law?

Emacs + gnus

Posted Jun 20, 2004 1:40 UTC (Sun) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122) [Link]

That "one-program-one-function" does not mean that you can't have alternatives, especially when there is an alternative view of what the functionality actually is.

Gnus view Emails quite differently from any other mail software. Everybody else think that Emails are something that you don't want to lose unless you press a command to do so. Gnus views Emails to be similar to News and expires in the same way. You are encouraged to configure it to automatically split mails into many groups, each group expires in a different way. Once you get used to it, you'll find that mails and news are really not very different after all, especially for public mailing lists, mailing lists of the company you're working on, and people who will send you mail for exactly one reason (e.g., your insurance agent).

You can say that this is a consequence of putting a round peg into a square hole, but I think otherwise. It gives you a break to have to delete Emails: all you do is to mark it as read (or simply catch up the whole group), the mail will be kept there for a while, and then will disappear by itself when it ages. And you keep mails for mail and news in the same way (using Gnus' "cache" feature), which copy it to a place and still treat it as part of the newsgroup rather than having you to find somewhere to copy to. After using it for I think 3 years, I'm pretty much ruled out from any other mail readers.

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