On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 20:39:25 -0500, Peter S Galbraith
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted to gmane.linux.debian.devel.emacsen:
>> - Multiple mailboxes
> MH-E simply lies on top on an MH implementation. While there is POP
> support in nmh (and IMAP in mu-mh), I simply use fetchmail to get my
> mail, which gives it to postfix which gives it to procmail. Therefore
> having multiple mailboxes is not a problem.
Not handling IMAP properly is a major deficiency IMHO. Anything which
treats IMAP as if it were POP is flawed. I need IMAP to work like
${beer} intended, i.e. messages are stored on the server along with
any state information that I or my MUA needs in order to handle them
properly.
I switched from (RMAIL to VM to) Wanderlust to Gnus and while I can
hardly comment on the current state of RMAIL (last version I used was
with Emacs 19.something), I can offer the following subjective
comments:
* VM has some "attitude problems" which I kept running into again
and again. There are hooks for many things but the code I have
looked at (admittedly mostly VM 6.xx) was a textbook example of
how not to write maintainable, extensible code. I was able to grok
enough of it to code advice around many of the features I wanted
to customize, but on the whole, it didn't feel a whole lot
different from the frustration I normally associate with
closed-source software. Documentation was impressive on the face
of it, but it covered some stone-age version and was sometimes
even not accurate for how VM 4.x actually worked. Also, last time
I looked, IMAP was not handled properly (i.e. "POP-over-IMAP")
* I only briefly tried Wanderlust. I liked some things but the
Debian packaging mess at the time (wanderlust vs wl versus wl-beta
vs wl2 and between them various outdated and/or bleeding-edge
and/or broken versions all over stable, unstable, and testing)
made me steer clear of it. I'm running on stable and at the time I
wasn't qualified to maintain my own backport. Maybe now I would
try harder. Also at least at the time, the documentation sucked
unless you were fluent in Japanese. (English was but comprehend
not and of date it out there.)
* I avoided Gnus for a long time for mail, because I tried it once
and wasn't able to cope. No doubt at the time (when I had only
just barely switched from GNUS 4.x to Gnus 5.x) the documentation
was part of the problem. I find that now, more often than not, the
only problem with the documentation is that there's more of it
than I can conveniently keep tabs on. The same problem with
features. Most of them make a lot of sense, and if you can
tolerate the feeping creaturism of Emacs, I guess you should be
able to cope with Gnus, too :-)
I like many of the ideas of MH and if I didn't want to be able to
access my email over orthodox IMAP, I would still be considering it
very seriously.
/* era */
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