VM is a mail reader that runs inside GNU Emacs and XEmacs. The name is the short form of “View Mail” and it is also occasionally referred to by its long name (e.g., in the title of this page).
Per its Savannah page, as of Jan 2012, the last update was May 2010.
VM is shipped with XEmacs but not with GNU Emacs. You can get the latest version (8.0.0 and up) at its official home: http://www.nongnu.org/viewmail/. Version 7.19 is hosted at its old official home: http://www.wonderworks.com/vm/.
The code base and the latest pre-releases of VM can be browsed at https://launchpad.net/vm.
VM is very well documented. It comes with a fine set of info pages, and there are two EmacsNewsgroups dealing with VM. These pages attempt to distill some of the useful information from the other sources.
Getting Started
VM Customization
VM and Other Packages
VM Addons
VM Wishlist
Documentation
- Info manual on VM version 7, Kyle Jones at Wonderworks, May 2003. Even though it is out of date, this continues to be good reference for the basics. See the info manual in your VM distribution for up to date documentation.
- VM FAQ, Brian Gorka, Samuel Mikes and Gregory Neil Shapiro at Wonderworks, February 2001.
- FAQ: Using VM with Procmail, Samuel Mikes at Wonderworks, April 1998. Explanation of integrating VM with external mail filtering.
External Links (tutorials, blogs and configuration files)
- V. L. Simpson, Emacs and Email: The VM Mail Package, Linux Gazette, December 2004. A very nice tutorial, which is still valuable despite its age.
- Phil Sung, VM configuration and workflow, September 13, 2008. Nice article on setting up VM.
- Arik Mitschang, emacs: VM Mail Reader, December 29, 2009. Help for setting up VM. Dead link --PasJa
- Josh Braun, Setting up a VM Mail Client in Emacs, June 22, 2011. Basic but adequate instructions for setting up VM.
- Robert Adesam, Issue with VM and IMAP over SSL stunnel, June 23, 2011. Reports that stunnel version 4.35 does not work correctly. Also mentioned here and here.
- Joe Bayes, vm: Emacs's mail reader, date unknown. A simple introduction to using VM.
- Alley Stoughton, Support for Using Emacs/VM for Reading and Sending Mail on a Mac, undated.
- Bill Clementson, VM and Gmail Setup for Dummies, October 23, 2006. Although a bit dated, and uses POP for Gmail, it has useful information on setting up starttls.
- Andreas Viklund, Configuring Emacs for GMail's SMTP over SSL, April 26, 2007. Another article on configuring Emacs SMTP for GMail starttls.
- XEmacs, XEmacs 21.5 FAQ section on Connecting to the Internet, includes FAQ’s on VM.
- Francois Flueret, VM configuration file
- Glen Morris, Computer stuff (includes VM configuration file).
- Umesh Nair, VM configuration file.
- Eli Barzilay, VM configuration file on Github.
- VM and the FSF, Sep 22, 2000. bug-gnu-emacs mailing list discussion about why VM is not included with Emacs.
CategoryMail