Re: Emacspeak with gmail

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fetchmail and gmail work fine. Another alternative is to just use VM's direct imap support. Uday Reddy has put a fair amount of work into improving VM's support for imap and has added things like header-only downloads and message caching etc to try and make it faster. I've found it pretty good for moderate sized mail folders. I use gmail filters as much as possible to ensure mail is broken up into lots of smaller folders rather than just one big folder. You can access different imap folders from within VM.

The big advantage of doing this is you get a consistent message state tracking. You know which messages are new, unread, replied to etc as VM will update such attributes on gmail. You cannot have this with the fetchmail approach. 

The big disadvantage is that if you get a large number of messages or you are on a slow or unreliable network connection, Emacs can appear to freeze for a time when retrieving messages. I've not found this an issue myself, but have seen reports from others regarding this. I guess it is an unavoidable consequence of Emacs' lack of threading support. 

What I have not tried yet is configuring VM to use gmail as its smtp server. This is possible and further enhances interaction with gmail by tracking contacts and sent mail in one place. 

Tim

On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 4:00 PM, T.V. Raman <tv.raman.tv@gmail.com> wrote:

Jason makes a good point.

The emacspeak url template for gmail was created before imap
support went liv from memory. I personally  use fetchmail with
imap and then read email using vm; I use the web interface mostly
for searches. Haven't played with NotMuch

--
Best Regards,
--raman

--
Best Regards,
--raman

On 1/21/11, Jason White <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> It's also worth noting that if you want a mail system based on searches and
> tags, similar in concept to the Gmail Web interface, you can use Notmuch
> (http://notmuchmail.org/), basic code for better supporting which in
> Emacspeak
> was posted a while ago on this list.
>
> I am still waiting for a few significant features to be implemented before I
> consider making the transition.
>
> Note that you could use Fetchmail or OfflineIMAP to retrieve the mail from a
> GMail account, and that Notmuch over ssh is also possible according to
> mailing
> list posts, in the event that you want to use another Linux machine as your
> server with a laptop as the client.
>
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