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authorSacha Chua <sacha@sachachua.com>2025-12-21 19:45:39 -0500
committerSacha Chua <sacha@sachachua.com>2025-12-21 19:45:39 -0500
commit0778d8194c4d576c71545b49e18a7fbbb262e5d9 (patch)
tree9825c8f5766ab3154263e01237a37151a2f558a0 /2025
parent95280c249ec723b079895cc10e58efaedba00790 (diff)
downloademacsconf-wiki-0778d8194c4d576c71545b49e18a7fbbb262e5d9.tar.xz
emacsconf-wiki-0778d8194c4d576c71545b49e18a7fbbb262e5d9.zip
add discussion to gnus
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@@ -36,6 +36,56 @@ reading and composing emails, showcasing one of many approaches for
using GNU Emacs for email communications.
+## Discussion / notes
+
+- bandali: here's the talk page on my site, along with the sample init and authinfo files: https://kelar.org/~bandali/2025/12/06/emacsconf-2025-gnus.html
+
+- Q: I noticed that it took a considerable amount of time to send
+ email. Is it possible to configure gnus to use an external smtp
+ client to send emails? (thanks! I agree, even on thunderbird it's
+ slow sometimes).
+ - A: Right, yes, it definitely is possible. In fact, in the past, I've used, I believe, MSMTP, which is a small SMTP implementation that's independent of Emacs. So you can do that. It's also possible to, pointed to have it use the sendmail binary on your system. If you have a local MTA mail transfer agents like Exim or Postfix installed and configure. I believe that should also dispatch and return instantaneously and then have Postfix or Exim deal with sending the message on their terms without blocking Emacs. I don't know, it depends. Normally it's not always that slow. Sometimes it is. I think it also depends on the load on your mail server. Sometimes it's instantaneous, sometimes not. So I hope that helps.
+- Q: Is the dovecot workaround actually a solution? I haven't tried
+ it, but if it works smoothly I'll surely do so.
+ - A: It is, it really is. I've actually been using that setup for many years. I can't remember. Oh, I believe it's Eric Abramson who first shared instructions on how to set this up. Let's see if I can find it. There we go. Yeah, this is it. I'll share this on IRC as well. Yeah, so Dovecot is very, very efficient. It's written in C. And yeah, when you point Gnus to an IMAP server like Dovecot, dealing with email is pretty instantaneous. This article or post by Eric is great. Although I will say that there was a recent major release of Dovecot. I can't remember if it's 2.4 or 2.5. and it's a breaking change. They change a lot of the configuration syntax, so there's a high likelihood that this drop-in configuration won't work, even though that's what I used as my starting point a couple years ago. I will be writing an article on my personal site to go over how to configure recent versions of Dovecot for such a setup, for a local setup.
+- Q: Do you have experience with mu4e or Notmuch, and why would you say
+ Gnus is worth using compared to these?
+ - A: I do have experience with these, although it goes back many years, and I'm sure both of these have evolved since, and they're great pieces of software in their own rights. And actually I did use them in that order. Like I first tried Mu4e in Emacs, when I started using email in Emacs, then I tried Notmuch for a while, and then I went to Gnus. They're great. They have like pros and cons. Mu4e, I believe, has excellent maildir handling directly, if I'm not mistaken, unlike Gnus, so you can point it directly to your maildirs locally, and it should work fine, if I'm remembering correctly. Notmuch is also excellent. The thing with Notmuch is that it uses Xapien for indexing and searching email. It's tag-based, so you can tag messages. And then, yeah, it's amazing for tagging and searching capabilities, very powerful search features. And my reason for trying Gnus and then, I don't know, eventually liking it was couple of years ago, I went through this kind of phase of trying and trying to like use and stick with packages that are built into GNU Emacs as much as possible. No particular reason that I would like, you know, recommend people do that per se, but yeah, that's just what I wanted to do. Cause I noticed my configurations were like growing unwieldy. So I, like many others declared, Emacs in its bankruptcy, in its file bankruptcy, and configure things from scratch and try to use whatever that Emacs had to offer built in itself, and then only reach for a couple of external packages here and there. So that's what I went to. That's how I ended up on Gnu's. And it's been very nice. I've tried a few other email clients since then, temporarily, like I tried AERC, A-E-R-C, which is not built into Emacs, but I don't know, I keep coming back to Gnus. It's great to have it all, to be able to do all these things from within GNU Emacs.
+- Q: At my organization, we're forced to use OAuth with outlook and
+ they've also blacklisted all email clients except thunderbird (but
+ they don't support it, only the webmail or the outlook app). Do you
+ know if this is something that can be circumvented in Gnus? (I've
+ tried it with notmuch for example, and it never worked. Even K-mail
+ on android didn't work). But this specific to IT at my org. I'll
+ ask on IRC. Thanks!
+ - A: So if I'm pretty sure, at least with the recent Emacs versions, Gnus does support xOAuth as a backend. So I think you should be able to do that even with just the things, the machinery built into Emacs. Even so, I think there are external packages and programs. One of them I think comes from this Cyrus IMAP world of things that implement like XOAuth. So you should be able to do that. You should be able to use that to get authenticated to your organization's mail server. But I've never tried that myself. In terms of like blacklisting all email clients, I don't know how they would do it outside of, you know, this kind of authentication thingy. If, you know, they check the user agent header or something, that's pretty easy to customize and set. With Gnus, you can set, define a posting style to set a custom user agent. So, yeah, that's as far as I know. Thunderbird is pretty nice too. Like I reach out for it sometimes when I'm in a rush or can't, don't have the time to like set up Gnus with like some new like IMAP server or something. I reach for it sometimes, but yeah, I primarily use Gnus. I see. So the question says they tried it with not much and it never worked. Even KML on Android didn't work. Right. Yeah, I'm not sure. If you can like provide maybe more details as to like what doesn't work or if you get any particular error messages or like how they're trying to like prevent you from using it, then maybe folks could have some ideas of maybe how to get around that. ... So the organization is doing some kind of check during setting up of OAuth. So I think how that works is sometimes these email clients, I think at least this is the case for Gmail or something, where a project such as Thunderbird needs to apply for some kind of token to be able to authenticate and connect its users to a mail server. So all I will say is that Thunderbird is free software and the sources are available and you might be able to find the token that they use and yeah.
+
+- excellent introduction to gnus! thanks!!
+- Very nice talk! Thank you.
+- Really good introduction, this will be my go to link from now whenever someone asks "how to use gnus".
+- great - going to finally be brave and give gnus a look after that, no excuse not to anymore
+- I really enjoyed, from time to time I came across to gnus, but I don't have the time to tune it and I keep with mu4e+mbsync to handle my email
+- Yes, it covered the key points very well and should hopefully encourage others to start using gnus.
+- https://ericabrahamsen.net/tech/2014/oct/gnus-dovecot-lucene.html
+- okay thanks, will do gnus + dovecot ater the conf.
+- For me, the key feature of gnus is scoring (both manual and adaptive)!
+- I use davmail to access Outlook from gnus.
+- Looking forward to more videos on GNUS from you! Excellent talk!!
+- +1. Excellent introduction. If I would have had such a tutorial some
+ 15 years ago when I first used Gnus, my learning curve would not
+ have been that steep. Thanks! Hope it will help new users. So,
+ spread the word about your talk!
+- Fantastic presentation!
+- Thanks for this talk, I liked that you started with a clean setup
+ and built from that. Reading and writing emails in Emacs is
+ definately not straighforward, I find it frustating that there are
+ so many pieces to put together, and a bunch of documentation to
+ read. I admit I find Gnus overwhelming. Still, like you said, this
+ is built-in into Emacs, and it can be used to read different type of
+ contents, like emails and newgroups, rss feeds, etc. Looking forward
+ to more documentation and tutorials from you, thanks again!
+- BTW, I would have like to see a quick demo of Gnus while it is fully
+ configured and tweaked, just to tease me to bother using it!
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