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by snakeanus 3196 days ago
I tried to use gnus in the past as a nntp and smtp client and I hated it. When for example I had set my user-mail-address and mail-host-address to something specific that I wanted but that gnus did not like (even though it was a valid address) it would silently replace it with some bullshit like "i-did-not-set--mail-host-address--so-tickle-me" at the from header (or was that at the message-id header? I don't exactly remember).

It also made it a pain in the butt to use a socks proxy with it. Moreover it failed to un-base64 images in emails (failing to display them), when I tried to make it open an image it would just pass the base64 string to mpv instead of bothering to un-base64 it.

I moved to mutt since then but I do want to try some other emacs clients (mostly due to the emacs and org-mode integration).
2 comments
nextos 3196 days ago
Gnus is a bit tricky, as it is an old application that has accumulated a lot of cruft. In particular, defaults are a bit bizarre for 2017.

But many users stick to it as its scoring system to prioritize emails is great at handling thousands of emails from mailing lists.

Mu4e and notmuch have excellent clients for Emacs. I slightly prefer notmuch as it has a simpler UI. Mu4e is a bit more polished, but I found its mail compose setup much less friendly than Gnus or notmuch.

One can set up notmuch as an excellent MUA centered around saved searches. I prefer such a workflow to tags or folders:

http://www.holgerschurig.de/en/emacs-notmuch-hello/

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snakeanus 3196 days ago
Thank you for your reply, I was not aware of Mu4e and notmuch before, I will try both of them.

Have you ever tried mew? I heard a few good comments about it in the past but I have no idea how it compares to these clients.

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nextos 3195 days ago
No, I haven't tried mew.

Mu4e and notmuch are Gmail-like clients. Quite modern and well-maintained. Centered around searching and tagging.

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u801e 3195 days ago
> I tried to use gnus in the past as a nntp and smtp client and I hated it.

One thing that I noticed with gnus was that it seemed to be very slow in threading messages (when dealing with more than 10000 headers). I'm not sure if it was a problem with my configuration though.

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