Re: Question mail package

[Bob Newell]

> On 2019-10-21 14:07, Ergus <spacibba@aol.com> wrote:
> > Hi I have a simple question. What are the recommended
> > application/package for mailing these days?

Aloha,

This question comes up often and there is a lot of discussion in
various groups that you can access. But you characterize this as a
simple question! It is actually not especially simple. It really
depends what you want to do and how much effort you wish to put into
it.

I've used Gnus for a good 10 years and would never go back to anything
else. My configuration is over 1,000 lines of elisp now and would do
you little good, except as an example of how flexible, adaptable, and
complex(!) Gnus can be.

If you want the absolute ultimate, it's Gnus. There's never been
something that I wanted to do with email and couldn't do with Gnus,
including some semi-outrageous stuff like adapting language input
methods based on the recipient, sending individual emails to each
member of a group mailing list, and of course working with multiple
email accounts and multiple, adaptive email identities (some users
always get mail from my precious AOL account, etc.) Gnus in
combination with BBDB and org-mode blows everything else out of the
water in terms of capabilities for doing productive work with email.

But that comes at a price, which is paid in time and effort, and often
quite a lot of it, especially in the very beginning.

Once upon a time, I used rmail (which of course also comes with
emacs). Rmail is dead simple, requires relatively little
configuration, and does the basics, namely, handling email sending and
receiving. That's more than enough for some folks. And there are
products in-between rmail and Gnus in complexity and capability.

I'd suggest you think about what you want to do now with email and
what you might wish to do in the future. That may help guide your
choice.

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i

Via Linux/Emacs/Gnus/BBDB.