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Trying Gnus as an Email Client

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Re: Trying Gnus as an Email Client

#21

Post by spwhitton »

donaldihunter wrote: post #3

I started using Gnus back when the ding rewrite was released, primarily for news then for email as well to get away from the hellish Lotus Notes client. The unified experience, with scoring and threading was a real boon. At some point I shifted to Outlook because I was getting so much html and office docs filling my email. I am back to using Gnus for consuming the Linux kernel mailing lists as newsgroups where the pl…

I transferred all my Sieve rules for marking mail as read to Gnus scoring rules, but haven't made much progress beyond that. I turned on adaptive scoring, but I'm not convinced it is achieving anything. How do you make scoring useful, assuming you do mean more than just the equivalent of Sieve mark-as-read rules?

Re: Trying Gnus as an Email Client

#22

Post by JanisErdmanis »

galdor wrote: post #17
JanisErdmanis wrote: post #13

I used to run mu4e with my gmail accounts, those were fun times. That unfortunately no longer seems to be possible since Gmail, Outlook and others no longer provide SMTP service in the name of two factor authentication. Keeps my blood boiling as now every email provider has its own API. Anyway, what email providers do people use today? One I found with SMTP support tends to be directed to spambox by Gmail.

I don't know about Outlook and others, but you can still use any client you want, both for IMAP and SMTP access, using application passwords[1]. I have been doing that for years, both for Gmail and Google Workspace, without any issue. [1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en

Thanks, that looks like a good solution.

Re: Trying Gnus as an Email Client

#23

Post by donaldihunter »

spwhitton wrote: post #21
donaldihunter wrote: post #3

I started using Gnus back when the ding rewrite was released, primarily for news then for email as well to get away from the hellish Lotus Notes client. The unified experience, with scoring and threading was a real boon. At some point I shifted to Outlook because I was getting so much html and office docs filling my email. I am back to using Gnus for consuming the Linux kernel mailing lists as newsgroups where the pl…

I transferred all my Sieve rules for marking mail as read to Gnus scoring rules, but haven't made much progress beyond that. I turned on adaptive scoring, but I'm not convinced it is achieving anything. How do you make scoring useful, assuming you do mean more than just the equivalent of Sieve mark-as-read rules?

I mostly use permanent rules to increase the score of reputable contributors to the kernel mailing lists, maintainers, etc. I also use a mixture of permanent and temporary rules to increase the score of things I want to follow or decrease for things I want to ignore. Oh and I lower the score of replies, which has the effect of de-emphasising them unless they’re part of a thread that has an increased score.

Re: Trying Gnus as an Email Client

#24

Post by unhammer »

spwhitton wrote: post #19

It's interesting that this user was using notmuch before Gnus. I switched notmuch.el+notmuch to Gnus+notmuch last year, i.e., I kept using notmuch but I switched from notmuch's own Emacs frontend to Gnus's support for notmuch. It takes Gnus ten minutes to start up even with nativecomp, and hours to do its initial indexing (but you already have to give up that time for notmuch's own indexing). It's unusable without na…

Wow. For me, Gnus starts in <10s. But I guess it depends a lot on what backends you use (I use dovecot+mbsync for mail, so Gnus doesn't really index anything)

Re: Trying Gnus as an Email Client

#25

Post by gnufx »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #13

I used to run mu4e with my gmail accounts, those were fun times. That unfortunately no longer seems to be possible since Gmail, Outlook and others no longer provide SMTP service in the name of two factor authentication. Keeps my blood boiling as now every email provider has its own API. Anyway, what email providers do people use today? One I found with SMTP support tends to be directed to spambox by Gmail.

If you need an IMAP/SMTP gateway to O365/Exchange, at least, try https://davmail.sourceforge.net/

Re: Trying Gnus as an Email Client

#26

Post by gnufx »

rleigh wrote: post #7

I used it for years until one day it corrupted its own cache and become thoroughly unusable. Manually repairing tens of megabytes of serialised Lisp isn't fun or practical. If you live in Emacs, it's a great tool though. Sadly, I had to move on to Thunderbird, and lately Outlook. Sad to say it, but email has become an absolute pain to use and text-based email clients are increasingly unusable. At some level, I feel I…

If "cache" means .newsrc.eld, 10s of MB seems rather large. I wonder what the corruption was, since it doesn't sound like anything I can remember in ages using Gnus. .newsrc.eld does have backups in the same way as other files.

If you're missing XOAUTH2 authentication, there is an Emacs auth-source backend for it.

Re: Trying Gnus as an Email Client

#27

Post by gnufx »

hayabuz wrote: post #8
rleigh wrote: post #7

I used it for years until one day it corrupted its own cache and become thoroughly unusable. Manually repairing tens of megabytes of serialised Lisp isn't fun or practical. If you live in Emacs, it's a great tool though. Sadly, I had to move on to Thunderbird, and lately Outlook. Sad to say it, but email has become an absolute pain to use and text-based email clients are increasingly unusable. At some level, I feel I…

I have the exact same experience. Migrated from mu to thunderbird due to problems with modern email and lately one of the organizations I work for migrated from imap so that thunderbird also has become unusable.

If that means O365/Exchange with IMAP turned off, I don't remember about Thunderbird, but Evolution works, or see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36023845

Re: Trying Gnus as an Email Client

#28

Post by gnufx »

taeric wrote: post #15
JanisErdmanis wrote: post #13

I used to run mu4e with my gmail accounts, those were fun times. That unfortunately no longer seems to be possible since Gmail, Outlook and others no longer provide SMTP service in the name of two factor authentication. Keeps my blood boiling as now every email provider has its own API. Anyway, what email providers do people use today? One I found with SMTP support tends to be directed to spambox by Gmail.

I had to stop around the time of 2fa, as well. Hoped there was a way around that by now. (Well, not around, but with.)

2FA in what context? App passwords, XOAUTH2, Kerberos pre-auth...? OTP or FIDO? You should be able to work with them anyway.

Re: Trying Gnus as an Email Client

#29

Post by rprospero »

smartmic wrote: post #5

I switched from (neo)mutt to Gnus and never looked backed. Gnus has a much nicer user experience and the integration into Emacs alone is worth switching. What I particularly like: I can use the native IMAP server-side search with Gnus' own syntax. This means I have never been tempted to look at search/index specialized clients like notmuch or mu4e. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Sea... EDIT:…

I'm curious how you had such great luck with Gnus IMAP. I'm a Gnus user myself, but I had to switch to local Maildir because I couldn't get a workable experience with the IMAP configuration. Specifically, Gnus would freeze Emacs for several minutes every time I loaded Gnus. This mostly seemed to be a problem when I accessed an account with more than 10,000 items in a mail folder.

Running the same folder in a local Maildir didn't cause an issue, so I made the switch, but it would be nice to go back to IMAP. Partially back to IMAP, anyway - the office Outlook server requires OAUTH for IMAP and I don't believe that GNUS supports that configuration.

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