Monday afternoon random thoughts

Ben Pfaff pfaffben@msu.edu
05 Mar 2001 20:31:18 -0500


I like Chaos/Semi-Gnus, my current mail/newsgroup client.  It has
every feature you might ever want, including support for MIME
viewing and sending, multilingual support for just about every
human language (including French and Japanese, the ones I
typically deal with), email expiration instead of email deletion
(so if you suddenly need something you deleted 3 days ago, you
can still pull it up), the best email composition editor around
:-), support for hairy quoting, all sorts of nice threading
features (commands like ^ to view an article's parent and A T to
pull an entire thread from a newsgroup are life-savers
sometimes).  Moreover, it's scriptable using Emacs Lisp, it
integrates nicely with bbdb to include the best address book I've
seen anywhere, it integrates with mailcrypt to include support
for PGP signatures and en-/de-cryption at the touch of a button,
you can insert arbitrary headers into emails and newsgroup
articles, and lots more stuff I can't really live without
anymore.

That said, I don't recommend it to people who are scared of
hacking a little Lisp (or who don't like Emacs (heathens!)).  My
Lisp file that contains Gnus preferences is almost 500 lines
long, though a lot of that is my set of signature files.

-- 
"The only problem with Linux for Dummies is that the advice it
 contains will result only in embarrassment and inconvenience if
 followed, not actual death."
--henke at insync dot net