Using gnus for Gmail

My primary email account is with Gmail. Overall it works pretty well. In particular, it works well on the phone.

However, I have been finding email less and less effective as a communication medium of late, for a number of reasons.

• There is too much clutter there.

  Not really spam, but over the years too many organisations have got my email address. Sometimes this is good: booking flights or hotels or whatever, the emails they send are useful, but then they send a bundle of spam and special offers.

• Some key contacts don't really use email. Not naming names, but the younger you are the less likely it is that email will be your default way to communicate electronically.

• The Gmail interface in chrome is a resource hog. Further it does not make good use of the real estate.

• The editor for writing emails is ok, but rather limited

• Some simple things are hard/impossible to do. For example, sometimes I am working on a draft and want to share the draft with someone else, leaving the draft in the drafts folder. No can do.

• I started using the amazing vimium plugin in Chrome. For Gmail to work you have to switch off Vimium, but then you are left with tabs where the Vimium shortcuts don't work. So, I think it is best to read email elsewhere. I tried a browser window just for email, but I end up opening new tabs, so that quickly fails.

Many years back I used to use RMAIL in emacs. It was a powerful client and I am left with my favourite editor.

So, asking google for emacs email client the answer that comes back is gnus.

The quickstart on EmacsWiki was enough to get me as far as seeing my gmail in emacs. I even managed to read a few emails and may have replied to one or two.

I have dabbled in gnus before, but it seems to have taken on a whole new life since then. I suspect a large part of the rest of this week, or maybe this month is going to go on figuring out how it all works.

So far though, I am liking it, so it is a good start.