Changing mail reader again. This time: Gnus

After a year reading my mail with Thunderbird, I have decided to try Gnus. I was already using it (though not often) for newsgroups, but now I wanted to do it for regular e-mail. In the past I have played with Gnus a bit, but never spent the necessary time to learn and configure it properly. This time I took a couple of "slow" days and decided to make the effort to dump Thunderbird and go for Gnus.

Some things that I didn't like in Thunderbird during this last year:

• Synchronizing between different computers was not straightforward. Mails were in the IMAP server, so that was not a problem, but I wasn't sure how I could easily synchronize news (from newsgroups), filters, etc. in different computers
• For some reason, Thunderbird would mark some messages as read, even when I didn't say so (quite dangerous, as once I read a message, I normally don't go back to it).
• The IMAP connection to my server was very slow after having thousands of messages, so I ended up archiving messages by year. This was a bit annoying, since from my home computer then I could not access those messages.
• Probably related to the archives, when searching for messages, sometimes a relevant message would show up in the search results, but when I tried to open the message, then nothing would show up. I would have to remember the date of the message and go and find it manually. Not very convenient.
•  Many times Thunderbird complained of server timeouts. As a result, messages that I thought were deleted, actually remained in the server and other oddities...

So I decided to give another chance to Gnus. Can it do everything I need? Was the effort to replace Thunderbird worthwhile?

My current mail setting now involves two accounts (work and private), which are backed up in a third account (which I never touch, this is just a repository of ALL the mail I get). At my workstation I run fetchmail to download locally (and delete from the mail accounts) all the e-mails I get in both accounts (the setting for this only involves creating a .fetchmailrc file where I specify the servers, accounts, etc.). (sendmail also needs to be running in the machine).

The Gnus manual (the PDF version) has 435 pages, so configuring it to your taste is going to take a while, but it is (like Emacs), incredibly flexible and powerful. For me the main features that I was looking for were:

• Reliability (I hate when software starts doing "things" on its own).
• Possibility of having exactly the same environment and configuration, no matter where in the whole Internet I was located.
• Good filing and searching of messages.

So after a while, reading the manual and asking in the relevant newsgroup, I have more or less everything I need (though this being Emacs, I'll probably never stop modifying the configuration):

1. mail is sorted into different groups, and those in the "MailingList" groups are deleted automatically in one week (unless I say otherwise), and other Mail is never deleted (unless I say otherwise); 
2. the search engine works really fast and well (actually much better than the Thunderbird search engine); 
3. this works inside Emacs, which I run in text mode (emacs -nw), inside GNU screen (well, actually Byobu), so wherever I am, I only need to connect through ssh to my workstation, and I have full control and exactly the same configuration everywhere.

And this is how it looks right now. The "Folder" view:

The messages view in one of the groups:

I have only used it for a couple of days, so I'm not sure how it will score against Thunderbird in a year from now, but so far I didn't have any problems, and it looks a better approach for my needs. I will report back in a year!

Opera Mail vs. Thunderbird 3.1 vs. GMail

During the last seven months I've been using the Opera Web browser and its integrated Mail Reader, but the experience started to become a bit painful, so I am going back to Firefox/Thunderbird.

Some of the things that pushed me to do this were:

• With the Opera browser I was not aware of anything like FoxyProxy, which is very useful for me when accessing my company intranet.
• My web bank page did not show properly (perhaps their fault?) with Opera.
• Had issues with logging in my favourite forum with Opera (oddly enough not in all computers).
• The full editor of blogger does not display properly in Opera.
• I didn't notice Opera browser being particularly faster than Firefox.
• Opera Mail did not let me put my own tags to messages, which was a bit annoying sometimes.
• Opera Mail did not let me configure my mail servers with not standard ports, which was annoying if I wanted to access my company servers through SSH tunnels.
• In a few occasions Opera Mail just stopped working, and after restarting all the messages would be gone (the local copy only), so it had to download them again from Google Mail.
• Lately Opera Mail started to think that I had millions of messages and would never finish synchronizing with Gmail. After restarting it, it would recognize again properly that I have only thousands.

So, I decided to try the new Thunderbird 3.1 for e-mail, and if it was up to the job, then go back to the Firefox/Thunderbird tandem. So, I collected the things that I need from a mail reader and did a comparison of Thunderbird, Opera Mail, and Gmail. I'm not interested in doing a comparison of all their features, only the ones that I tend to use. I haven't looked in any depth at the documentation of any of the readers, so some of the things here might be wrong. If you find that any of this information is incorrect or that there are better ways of doing something, please let me know, I'd love to hear it. Thunderbird did now manage to do everything I needed, and I don't get the problems mentioned above (plus it is open source software), so I'm now migrating to Firefox/Thunderbird... for how long?

Here it is a list of things that I want my mail reader to do:

• No folders, use tags instead

Folders are a nuisance, much better tags. You can apply several tags to the same message, and when searching for a particular tag is like you put a message in different folders at the same time.

- GMail: tags are called labels, and you can easily create arbitrary new labels and assign as many as you want to each message.

- Thunderbird: you can also create Tags and assign as many as you want to each message.

- Opera Mail: as far as I know, only the prebuilt tags.

• Don't mark messages as read automatically

- GMail apparently marks a message as read as soon as you open it. I don't like this at all. I don't even want to mark a message as read after a given set of time. For me "unread" means that I still have to do something with it, so I want to mark it as "read" only when I decide.

- Thunderbird. No problem. In Preferences, Advanced, unmark "Automatically mark messages as read", and I have to mark them as read explicitly.

- Opera Mail. This was also easily configurable.

• Efficient searching and filtering of messages

This is probably the most important feature for me, and for basic searches I think the three readers are very good. For "incremental searches" I think Gmail is the winner, but Thunderbird 3.1 second.

By incremental search I mean a situation like this: I want to find all mails that have something to do with "braemore statements", and once I found these, I want to find which ones have the word "winter" in the body.

- GMail. This is very good for incremental searches. Type "braemore statements" and a list of mail appears, then type "winter" and press again and bingo.

- Thunderbird. If I type all the words of an incremental search in the "Search all messages" box (thus not making it really incremental), then I also get the result, but ideally one would only type "braemore statements", then click on "Open as list" and then do a "Filter these messages", including the Body, but this does not work well and it seems to hang forever. (Filtering by body does seem to work at least in the Inbox, but it looks like it is really slow, while the Ctrl+K search is really fast. Go figure....).

- Opera Mail. The search option was very fast and quite good in general. For incremental searches it is very good. Type "braemore statements" in the general search box, then one the mails have been found, type "winter" in the quick filter, and bingo! This is what I was hoping it would work in Thunderbird as well, but for some reason it is not just yet.

• Good keyboard shortcuts

-  Gmail apparently does have shortcuts, but I doubt that they are comparable to Thunderbird or Opera in this respect.

• Make "read" messages disappear from view but keep them available

- GMail: I'm sure there has to be a way to do this, but it was not obvious.

- Thunderbird. In my Inbox I just click on the "Unread" quick filter and bingo. I only see the "unread" ones but all the rest are somewhere in there. Much cleaner view.

- Opera Mail also does this without any issues.

• Good display of HTML messages

- Obviously no trouble with this in Gmail, and Thunderbird does it very well also. With Opera Mail I had trouble with quite a few HTML formatted messages. I don't like HTML messages, but people insist on sending them, so I guess I have to be able to read them.

• Possibility of deleting attachments

- I could not find how to do this in either Gmail or OperaMail. With Thunderbird is just one of the options of the attachment itself.

• Different personalities 

 This is useful for sending personal mails, or mails to newsgroups, etc. with different mail addresses and/or signature.

- Gmail: I don't think this is possible at all.

- Thunderbird:  it has support for different personalities, and I have used it in the past. Very convenient. This, together with the possibility of using non-conventional ports was very useful for me. Different personalities with Google Mail as SMTP server does not seem to work (Gmail at the end sends the message with you gmail address, and that's all), but when using non-standard port for my SMTP server, I can send (regardless of where I am) mail through my company SMTP server (via ssh tunnels). This allows me to fake my e-mail address (to avoid spam) when sending messages to newsgroups, and to send mail to internal mailing lists at our company (which rejects mails if coming from an outside address).

- OperaMail. I think this is only possible if you have different mail accounts, so you can select which one to use every time you send a message, but I don't think it is possible having, for instance, different signatures associated with the same mail account.

• Automatic filtering of messages

OperaMail has something that is very useful: The automatic views of mails sent to newsgroups. With Thunderbird is not so automatic, but it does require little work: one can create Search Folders (Ctrl+Shift+F), where one can create complicated searches, and then save it as a search folder. For instance, I created a search folder called "Direct", where I only see mail that is directed personally to me, another search folder where I only see mail that has a particular mailing list address in the "To or CC" fields, etc. This is similar to the old folder mentality, but the messages don't go into any folder, they all can stay in the same folder, and this is just different filtered views of it. Much more powerful and convenient.

Switched to Opera Mail and Gmail...

Until now I managed all my e-mail with Thunderbird and our corporate e-mail server, but the searches were too slow, it was tedious to access the server from outside the company and the space in the server was a bit limited, so today I decided to switch...

And I went for Opera (with its integrated Opera Mail client) and Gmail. So all my mails are stored (after transferring about 8000 mails) in Gmail servers (although keeping my corporate e-mail address), and I use Opera Mail to access them (though I could use the Gmail web interface if I ever need to). The main reason to switch to Opera Mail is that it does away with folders, and it has the concept of views (searches in the Inbox, so mails can end up in different views, which is very convenient: similar to storing bookmarks with folders vs. storing them in something like del.icio.us where you assign tags to each bookmark). This way I find that I save a lot of time since I don't have to be careful about filing messages, and the searching capabilities of Opera Mail are very good. So far I have been using the new setting only a few hours, but I'm pretty convinced that I'm not going back...