Re: Mail reader
"Joey Hess" <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> Gary Hennigan wrote:
> > Can mutt do mail expiry? What is expiry? It makes mail act like
> > news. You don't delete news articles, they eventually just expire on
> > your news server. In gnus email acts the same way. You never, or very
> > rarely, delete email manually. A gnus process periodically runs and
> > cleans up unmarked email that is older than a specified amount of time
> > (configurable on an email group basis or as a default value if not
> > specified for a specific group).
>
> I suppose you could do this with mutt, but why not instead find a
> general-purpose tool that can do it in a cron job, set it up, and never
> have to worry about it again no matter what mailer you end up using.
> (That tool is archivemail.)
I could ask the same question only turned around -- Why use 4 or 5
utilities, with each being a possible point of failure in what these
days has become an important communication medium to most folks, when
one will suffice?
And let's not kid ourselves here, at one time Mutt may have been a
tiny extremely efficient MUA, but it's pretty large these days. Sort
of like vi -vs- vim. It doesn't compare to Emacs+Gnus, but then what
does? :)
It's a matter of taste. Do you want to maintain a number of simple
smaller tools for mail or a single tool. I still divide up some of the
tasks: I use fetchmail instead of gnus native IMAP support, and I use
procmail to filter at a high level and gnus to do fine-level sorting.
> Similarly, while mutt could probably be coaxed into filtering my mail,
> and downloading my mail over imap, and editing replies, sending out my
> mail over smtp, I instead use a selection of dedicated tools that I have
> tuned and evolved over time (procmail/spamassassin, isync, vim, postfix)
> for these tasks. I use mutt to read mail.
Well, I think you're operating under some bad assumptions. Gnus
doesn't edit my mail, emacs does. Like I said, I use procmail to
download my mail to 1 of 3 mail boxes then I use gnus to sort those
into appropriate folders. Also, I don't let gnus act as a MTA (can it
even do that?). On my system it just connects to port 25 on localhost
and that loads it off to exim on this box. Could Emacs+gnus do all
that? Maybe, but that's the great thing about Emacs, it probably could
do almost everything you want, but you don't have to use it in that
mode.
Anyway, I'm glad you're happy. I'm happy too and I've been using Emacs
+ Gnus for an awful long time (since around 1988 I think!) and it's
tuned to meet my needs exactly.
Gary
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