Gnus

I am really enjoying mu4e again after fixing the problem that caused it to be so slow. As I’ve said before, I’m very happy with mu4e and don’t have any desire to replace it. Nevertheless, I always find it interesting to read about other mail clients. The gorilla of them all is, of course, Gnus.

Everyone will tell you that Gnus is large and scary but very powerful. You can use it to read and send mail, to follow your RSS accounts, or use it for its original purpose of reading Usenet. I remember being impressed that John Wiegley, the Emacs maintainer and a Gnus power user, set a Gnus keyword flag in Gnus to bring any post in emacs-devel to his attention if it had “John?” in it. You can hear all about that and some of the other ways he uses Gnus in this Emacs Chat with Sacha.

If you’re wondering whether or not to start using Gnus, there are a lot of resources to help you decide. There’s the Emacs Chat a linked above, another Emacs Chat with Wiegley that also discusses Gnus, and, finally, a recent video by Protesilaos Stavrou.

Stavrou has recently moved from mu4e to Gnus. The video discusses how that has helped his workflow but most of the video is a demonstration of Gnus and some of the things you can do with it. One of the really great things about Gnus is its scoring of posts and emails. It brings the most important content to the top of your lists and can even hide threads, say, that you no longer have any interest in.

Take a look at Stavrou’s video to get an idea of some of Gnus features. If you’re still interested watch the two Emacs Chats. Watch them anyway; Sacha’s chats are always worth your time.

Update [2020-09-06 Sun 12:14]: GNUS → Gnus.

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