Having heard that Emacs has two built in email clients (rmail, gnus) I've been trying to get them to work for me. Everywhere I've read, I have seen people frustrated at not being able to get imap working, and complaining that Emacs freezes when it starts dealing with mail. So, why is this and is there anything we can do about it?
RMail and Gnus were originally intended to deal with mail from the local network, not remote servers on the internet. If RMail, for example, is collecting mail from a POP server, then Emacs multi-tasking is lost and it "freezes" until that mail collection is complete. The good news is that Emacs does come with the "Movemail" program needed to communicate with POP servers, so all this can be done from within Emacs.
Setting up email in Emacs comes at a cost.
The conclusions I've come to are that to use mail effectively, Emacs needs an external mail transfer agent to do the work of transferring the mail to and from the Internet, and then the mail client can do the email management. Once we make that breakthrough in thinking, the process becomes much easier and more flexible.
And we come again to Cygwin where those unix tools are provided.
Before I finish, I guess I should say that setting both clients up for POP access seems to be reasonably straightforward (haven't done it yet), and with additional SSL binaries even IMAP has been achieved by a few people (though trying to get their incantations to work for me has been elusive). Having said that, I'd point out that POP is as far as you can go with no additional binaries. It just seems that Emacs is a whole lot happier if an MTA is used to transfer the mail, rather than Emacs freezing while it does that job. Having Emacs lock up seems to defeat the purpose of ease of use.
later .....................
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