emacswiki dot wjcf at xoxy dot net
Below is some info on email within emacs. I gave this up, but I’ll leave it around in case there is something useful in there.
This is a scratchpad, to which I intend to add information and then perhaps promote it out of my personal page:
I decided to try to use offlineIMAP/Dovecot/Gnus for email. Gnus is synchronous so it can tie up emacs, so a good solution is to use offlineimap to get the mail, and then use a local IMAP server like Dovecot to access it (gnus has some problems reading the maildir output itself).
It’s essential to study the internal manual, particularly the “Mail in a Newsreader” section.
Installing offlineIMAP and configuring it is pretty straightforward and well documented. I’m currently running it in a screen session, though it could just run in emacs.
This doesn’t even have to run as a server - gnus can run it as a shell command directly. See config below
~/.gnus:
(setq gnus-select-method '(nnimap "Mail" (nnimap-stream shell))) (setq imap-shell-program "/usr/sbin/dovecot --exec-mail imap")
Working out what to do after M-x gnus is pretty bewildering until you trawl through a lot of doc. Some of the important keys I found:
In the groups (folders) view:
| L | List all groups, including unread |
| l | List only groups with unread |
| g | get new messages - refresh |
| A A | List all groups |
| ^ | go to a server view, then you can select your Mail server and get at the groups another way. Sometimes this is the only way I can see a new folder. Still working this out. |
In the group/folder view
| # | mark message. M-# unmarks, then commands can be done on multiple marked messages |
| M-u | clear all marks - ticks, read, old etc |
| M-g | refresh. With prefix arg., will also show previously read messages |
| R | Reply |
| F | Follow-up (reply all) |
| K H | send HTML message to display in browser |
| K b | create buttons for all mime parts |
| C-c C-s | Prefix for sort commands - C-h will show them all |
There’s no way around it though, you have to spend an hour or two reading the manual (and then revisiting it…).