setting up gnus

[ken]

Hey, group,

Because I really like emacs, I'm going to give gnus one more try.  (I've
spent a couple days reading docs, trying things, using Customize and
none of this has been of any use.  Well, actually, this is about the
third time I've spent a couple days trying to configure gnus.)  Emacs is
great and I'd really like to get it working for email.  Here's the
functionality I'm looking for:

Most recently I've been using Mozilla mail to manage five email
accounts.  Four of them use the same remote mail server... let's call it
"mail.abcmail.net".  Of course they all have different userids and
passwords and received email goes into separate folders according to the
email-address to which it was sent.  I use IMAP w/SSL (port 993) to read
mail.  Unless I specifically issue a command to delete and expunge an
email, it stays on the server.  Besides the INBOX folder, there are
several others.  I can also create folders there under INBOX with names
according to my choosing.  Again, all the email stays in all of these
folders-- even a standard/default folder called Trash where "deleted"
mail is placed-- unless I issue a command to erase them (a.k.a., "expunge").

If I receive an email that has been GPG-signed or -encrypted, clicking
on a little icon will verify the signature and/or decrypt it as needed;
if the relevant public key isn't already on my keyring, Mozilla will
prompt me with a yes/no, then if "yes", silently download and install it
and then verify|decrypt it without bothering the user at all.  Very slick.

Received email can be filtered and sorted in a variety of ways and
marked, labeled, color-coded, printed, moved (to another account
folder), saved (either to a local file or to a folder on the (remote)
mailserver), and in other ways manipulated.

If a received email contains a URI, it will be highlighted; clicking on
it will open it in the Mozilla browser.  If the URI is an email address,
an email composer window is invoked.


To send mail for these four accounts, the same remote mailserver (SMTP
(port 25) with TLS) is used.  There's a searchable addressbook available
for directly inserting one or more email addresses into any one or more
of the To, CC, BCC, and/or Reply-to fields.  Typing a destination email
address into any of these fields will initiate incremental
autocompletion of the email address.  A click of the mouse will GPG-sign
or -encrypt the outgoing message with a private key corresponding to
that email address.  Depending upon the email account, a copy of the
outgoing email is saved to a folder for that account on the remote mail
server or to one or another local folder.

The fifth email account is for reading email originating from the local
machine, mostly diagnostics spewed out from this and that daemon or
service.  It doesn't require encryption, but uses the folders,
filtering, labeling, printing, and other features.  The few times I send
an email from this account is mostly for testing or curiosity.

Because I have other security measures protecting my account, I have
Mozilla set up so that I don't have to enter a userid or password to
either read or write email on any account.


So that's what I'd like gnus to do.  As said above, I tried M-x
customize and that's far too cryptic to be of use to me.  I've also
consulted Info, the Emacs manual, the emacswiki, and several other
webpages, all to no avail.  I've done quite a bit of programming in my
day, but hardly any in elisp and it seems like I need to be a rather
proficient elisp programmer if I'm to configure gnus on my own.  So I'm
hoping for help from this list.

Reference above to doing something with a click of a mouse is just to
show the simplicity of invoking some action.  I'm not a big fan of the
mouse.  I would prefer to hit a key over having to reach for the mouse.

Progress thus far with gnus (highly abbreviated):  I was able to get
gnus to log into one account on the server doing authentication in plain
text, but none of the mail there showed up.  Inserting subsequent code
into ~/.gnus and ~/.emacs somehow screwed even this little bit of
success so that I couldn't even log in to the server.  So I've wiped all
the gnus-relevant code out of ~/.emacs and renamed ~/.gnus so it is no
longer functional either.  IOW, I'm back at the very beginning.  Any
tips anyone can provide will be on a "clean" configuration.


Thanks for your help,
ken

-- 
A lot of us are working harder than we want, at things we don't like to
do.  Why? ...In order to afford the sort of existence we don't care to live.
        -- Bradford Angier