When I initially revisited Emacs, I used mu4e (instead of Thunderbird) for my email.
I used the wonderful Gmane service to read mailing lists in Gnus and Elfeed to read blogs and RSS feeds within Emacs.
This worked fine but after a while it became a little tiresome having to remember different key bindings to essentially perform the same repetitive tasks; reading messages, navigating (next/previous) messages, moving messages, saving messages, marking messages, deleting messages, searching messages, forwarding messages, replying to messages and occasionally composing brand new messages.
The solution was blindingly obvious. Just use Gnus for everything involving a ‘message’ instead of three separate packages. One set of key bindings to learn and master and Gnus has comprehensive functionality. Less is more.
Converting all my email processing to Gnus was easy enough to address as I previously used Gnus to handle my email and Gnus natively supports the maildir format.
Accessing mail was fast as I had already invested in establishing a Dovecot mail server and transferred messages from the corporate IMAP server to local Maildir directories (using getmail).
To replace Elfeed for reading RSS subscriptions, Gnus offers a nnrss back end but it was so slow and sequential, it was virtually unusable. Investigations revealed another option. Lars doesn’t like anything that is slow and sequential so years ago, he created the Gwene (Gnus Web to Newsgroups) service which took any RSS or Atom feed and converted it to a pseudo newsgroup on the Gwene news server.
Gwene already carries a lot of popular blogs and feeds and if your esoteric favourite blog isn’t present, you can simply add it and the content appears immediately.
I was about to celebrate and put the kettle on when, suddenly, unexpectedly and rather inconveniently, Lars decided to shutdown the freely available Gmane (and Gwene) services for understandable reasons (idiots launching DDOS attacks on the servers, threat of legal action).
I then researched alternative methods and experimented with a number of RSS to mail gateways. The best one was rss2leafnode which takes a list of blog subscriptions and periodically fed the content into a local NNTP news server - leafnode.
This solution worked well as I was now using Gnus to read email, mailing lists, newsgroups, blogs and RSS feeds.
Perfect - well almost. One of the advantages of mu4e (and notmuch) is the lightning fast search and powerful abilities. In Gnus, you are able to limit lists of articles by author, subject and marks and use IMAP search functionality.
However, I regularly used combinations of search terms and full text search on the message body. For example, display all messages from Peter to the ‘Footy’ mailing list in 2016 where he mentions ‘Basingstoke’. In mu4e, this search is done using a query
'from:peter to:footy date:20160101..20161231 basingstoke'
I have always tended to use hierarchical directories and mail folders so my mail is archived by year. Gnus could also limit a search by author and full text search can be done using the ’nnir’ engine so this type of search is possible in Gnus but unwieldly.
Combinations of multiple search terms were slightly more problematic but as I was already running a local mail server (Dovecot), I decided to use Solr to implement more flexible searching in my mail folders.
Occasionally, I want to search for a message and I have no clue who sent it or when so I need to search all email messages in all folders for ‘cobain conspiracy’. This is easy in Thunderbird and I found the best way to achieve this was to create Dovecot virtual folders for ‘All Mail’ and ‘Sent Mail’ that spanned all messages regrdless of date. Virtual folders can also be used to implement mu4e’s builtin queries for ‘Last 90 days’.
Why is Gnus unbelievably speedy ? Everything is local.
- No need for a direct IMAP connection.
- All email periodically delivered to local folders accessed via Dovecot.
- Message filtering and spam handling performed by Dovecot/Sieve prior to delivery.
- Solr maintains search indexes of email transparently.
- Mailing lists and RSS feeds updated automatically by Gmane/Gwene.
- Virtual folders automatically maintained by Dovecot.
- Gnus is simply the most fantastic piece of software.
My only reservations were that the number of Linux packages to be installed, configured and updated but thankfully, in September 2016, new owners stepped forward to resurrect the invaluable Gmane and Gwene services so I was able to dispense with Leafnode.
The only prolonged, expensive network access involved here is fetching articles from the Gmane and Gwene servers but this has proved so fast and reliable that I didn’t need to pursue the option of mirroring this small number of feeds locally in leafnode (although, undoubtedly, that would have been an interesting and fun exercise).