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Date:      Mon, 22 Sep 2003 09:57:01 -0700
From:      underway@comcast.net (Gary W. Swearingen)
To:        Marc Ramirez <marc.ramirez@bluecirclesoft.com>
Cc:        chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: What are people using for MUA's nowadays?
Message-ID:  <28r828bw2q.828@mail.comcast.net>
In-Reply-To: <20030922104213.L335@www.bluecirclesoft.com> (Marc Ramirez's message of "Mon, 22 Sep 2003 10:50:07 -0400 (EDT)")
References:  <20030922104213.L335@www.bluecirclesoft.com>

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Marc Ramirez <marc.ramirez@bluecirclesoft.com> writes:

> So, what are you young hipsters using to read main and filter spam?

Gnus in Xemacs.

I'm neither young or hip, but 5 or 6 years ago, after several months
of cursing the Netscape MUA (and remembering my experience with a
primative pine), I spent a few days banging my head against Gnus in
Xemacs, and the time investment has paid off wonderfully.  You'll need
to do a lot of reading of "info" nodes within Xemacs (or Emacs), to
use it well.  In its config file (eg, gnus.el), you can use regular
expressions to split mail into different folders.  You could have it
put spam in a spam folder, but the normal UI is so easy to use that
I'm happy just manually deleting them from my "default" folder (where
messages that don't get sent into named folders go).  It seems easy
enough to detect spam by the "From" and "Subject" info which is
displayed in the Gnus "summary" buffer, but you can look at a raw
message too, without causing any content to get "executed".

Gnus has more commands than you'll ever learn, and you can make it do
more (with elisp) if you really need to.

A few nice features:

--  The best feature is that you have all the features of Xemacs.
--  It has pull-down & pop-up menus for very many features, so
    you don't have to remember as much as you might expect.
--  You can easily reformat ">" quotes when replying.
--  It shows each person's quote in a different color.
--  You can reform a whole message while reading it.
--  E-mail and USENET behavior is very similar.
    Your folders are treated much like newgroups.
--  You can group folders and hide ones you aren't using.
    And list them in a desired order.
--  You can have it delete mailing list messages either
    after reading them or after a certain number of days.
--  You can have it show all message date/times in UTC or
    local instead of what the sender used.
--  Flexible control over header content (eg "From:").
--  It can avoid showing you the same msg more than once.
--  It can find "referenced" msgs.
--  It handles MIME quite well, especially if you tell it
    to display text/plain when available as it normally is.



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