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#+title: From mu4e to gnus
#+date: <2022-01-27>
mu4e is a very popular emacs email client, known for the ease of setup.
However it has its problems. The search is not very good (for example
I had a hard time searching for patterns with special symbols like
subjects containg the string "[gnu.org #". The indexing is part of the
program, which combined with its lack of concurrency, makes it rather
tricky to schedule update its index (on a side note elfeed has a
similar problem). One may need to perform some hack by killing any mu
process running in emacs in a cron script before indexing. I had been
doing manual indexing, and waiting for 30 seconds to index all the
mails whenever I want to check the mailbox for update was rather
distracting.
I made the move to gnus, which did not disappoint. Its search is more
useful and natural - one does not have to worry about symbols. If
gnus is configured with an imap server program like dovecot, indexing
becomes that program's job, which could run as a cron job without
bothering gnus. Since the imap server handles concurrency, one can
even open up gnus in multiple emacs instance. As an added benefit,
opening mailboxes is also much faster than mu4e.
As mentioned before, the popular RSS reader elfeed operates on a
similar model as mu4e, thus lacking concurrency. In fact, it is even
more limited, as if one runs elfeed on two emacs, the update in one
does not reflect on the other! I hope there could be an emacs RSS
reader with the simplicity of elfeed, but taking gnus approach,
leaving fetching, indexing and storage to a (local) server program,
while the reader itself simply acting as a local client.
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