Okay, so first question.
I noticed that it took considerable amount of time to send email.
Is it possible to configure to use an external SMTP client
to send emails? 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.
Let's see, is the Dovecot workaround
actually a solution?
I haven't tried it, but if it works smoothly,
I'll surely do so. 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 Gnu's
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 Dofconn
for such a setup, for a local setup.
Let's see. Do you have experience with Mu4e or not much?
And why would you say Gnus is worth using compared to these?
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. Let's see, some notes and feedback.
Thank you for all the kind words folks, appreciate it.
I'm glad that you found the presentation helpful
or somewhat useful. Let's see, new question.
Oh, and I will check IRC as well.
Let's see, 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? Let's see.
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.
Yeah. Let's see, I'm going to go
over and take a look at IRC. Yes, scoring is great.
In it for bankruptcy,
they have mail to use outlook from Gnus, right?
Yeah, there are various like solutions and workarounds.
Yeah, let's see. How's the schedule looking?
I think the next talk
is gonna start pretty soon, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, so I believe that's about all the time
that we have on the stream for the Q&A,
but of course I'll hang around here on big blue button
and IRC for a while if folks would like to ask more questions.
And also feel free to email me,
bandali@gnu.org
or at kelar.org with any questions.
Thanks again for the kind words folks, appreciate it.
Yeah, I myself also wish
that there were like some tutorials or something
when I was getting started with Guinness,
but we didn't have that. So, and I've been meaning
to like record a talk like this for years for EmacsConf,
but yeah, funnily enough, after like 10 years of,
at my 10th anniversary
of being involved with the conference,
I finally put together a talk of my own
to talk about configuring Gnus.
Let's see. Oh, I see, I see.
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.
Right, so yeah, I'm just reading this comment here.
You're very welcome again.
I hope you find it useful in some way.
So they say that they like the fact
that I started with a clean setup and built from that.
Reading and writing emails in Emacs
is definitely not straightforward.
And I find it frustrating
that there are so many pieces to put together
and a bunch of documentation to read.
And they admit that they find Gnus overwhelming.
I sympathize and empathize.
I've been in that very same situation.
And yeah, it's totally okay to feel like that.
I mean, email itself is kind of complex,
even on the server side.
If you've ever looked or have been interested
in self-hosting your email,
you know that there are so many moving parts and pieces.
So yeah, I hope that this short video
can be a useful first step
of getting you set up to
at least be able to read your emails
and compose and send them within Emacs
so that you can see that it's possible
and get that positive feedback loop going
and get the encouragement and then go from there.
Yeah, Gnus is most definitely very extensible.
It already has a lot of backends built into GNU Emacs,
and there are other ones
that people have written externally
on various code hosting forges
that you can download and set up. Yeah, thank you all.
It's nice to see that the talk
has kind of resonated with so many folks.
And, yeah, it is encouragement
for me to finally get around to starting
perhaps either a tutorial series
or like a video series like this
concretely showing and walking through
how to like set up and configure these different aspects.
There were so many other things that I wanted to show,
but didn't have the time
or couldn't squeeze it into
the 15, 20 minute format for the conference.
Yeah. I'm going to hang out here for a few more minutes.
Another comment, they would have liked
to see a quick demo of Gnus
while it is fully configured and tweaked.
That's kind of a teaser.
I can definitely do that sometime after the conference.
Truth be told, I don't customize the looks of it heavily.
I use the default layout
for the summary and article buffers.
With Gnus, you can even reconfigure that
to arrange these in your preferred location or layout.
I don't really do any of that.
For the most part, my setup is pretty simple.
I can actually maybe show my init file here. Let's see.
Yeah, so this is, I guess, part of my Gnus configuration.
I configure a couple of mail servers,
set up these expiry targets
so that I can hit capital E on a message
and then have it be archived. You can have it be immediate.
I do that for work messages
or you can use the default seven day,
where if a message is older than seven days,
like once it reaches that age
and it's been marked as expired and it'll be moved into,
like for example, this yearly archive directory,
like archive. For example, 2025.
Yeah, you can do like mail splitting,
automatically filing email.
The fancy splitting is the more powerful variant.
You can use like all kinds of regular expressions
and move email around depending on
what field or what header
matches what regular expression.
What else? Gnus has things,
has a facility like Gnus parameters
for configuring individual groups or directories.
Like if you file all the mailing or the mails
for a particular mailing list into a certain group.
And for example, if they add
the name of the mailing list
to the, subject header.
They prefix the subject header with the name of the list.
You can set that here
and Gnus will automatically
hide that for you. So, let's see.
There's a news agent,
which I won't even get into because it's a rabbit hole.
It's pretty cool. Definitely check it out.
You can define what MIME parts should be buttonized
so that you can like easily toggle them
when displaying the article.
Yeah, you can customize the list
of the headers that are displayed and the order of them.
Like I showed in the sample init file that I provided.
Games can integrate with Dired.
You can set like custom signatures like here.
I might define something
and then I use it later in the posting,
in the posting, the news posting styles variable.
I set a signature to that. Yeah.
You can write custom like functions to move email around.
So I have this like Gnus chunk article function
that I bind to VS,
so V is the prefix came up that I defined,
and then S, so you can do things like that.
You can customize the format of the topic lines,
so if I actually launch Gnus with my own configuration,
this is how it might look like, so.
You can define archive decoders
to let you like automatically decode
inside the Gnus article buffer,
how to extract certain archive formats.
Like for example, I defined this one for Gzip.
You can set like discouraged alternatives
to like, for example, hide HTML email by default,
especially if there is a plain text version. I do that.
GNU says machinery around like encrypting emails.
It has a bunch of customizations.
that you can configure and have Dynos behave a certain way.
For example, when replying to signed or encrypted emails.
And yeah. Anyway. That's about it.
So yeah, thanks again for hanging out with me, folks.
I appreciate all the kind words.
comments and yeah, I'm also
looking forward to trying and putting together
more videos or articles about Gnus.
Definitely one about configuring Dovecot for local mail.
And yeah, take it from there. Thanks again.
Hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.