Email On The Emacspeak Audio Desktop

Email can be retrieved in a number of ways:

• IMap via Emacs This is implemented well in GNUS, and poorly in Emacs/VM. Note that Emacs is single-threaded, and fetching large volumes of email via IMap is painful.
• Batch Retrieval: IMap Tools like fetchmail, offlineimap and friends that live outside of Emacs can be used to batch-retrieve email in the background. The retrieved mail gets delivered locally as in the past.
• Mail Filtering: UNIX procmail enables filtering of locally delivered email into separate folders for automatically organizing incoming email.

Sending email involves:

1. Composing email — typically invoked via key-sequence C-x m (command: compose-mail). Emacs email packages implement specific versions of this command, e.g. vm-mail from package emacs/vm, message-mail from the message package etc.
2. Sending email: This is specific to the email provider being used, e.g., GMail. In the past, UNIX machines could talk SMTP to the Mail Gateway, but this has mostly disappeared over time. For an example of how to configure Emacs to send email via GMail using SMTP , see file tvr/gm-smtp.el in the emacspeak repository.

• UNIX Mail: An email folder is a file of messages. This format is used by clients like Emacs/VM, UNIX Mail etc.
• Maildir: A mail folder is a directory, with individual email messages living in files of their own. Sample clients include MH-E (UNIX MH), MU4E.
• RMail This is Emacs' original email format.

This is the email setup on my workstation. See next section for the email setup while mobile.

1. I batch-retrieve email using fetchmail.
2. This email gets filtered through procmail and auto-filed into several folders based on a set of procmail rules. Typical rules include separating out various email lists into their respective folders.
3. Note that this does not preclude using IMap via GNUS to read email while online.
4. Email that is not filtered into separate folders e.g. email that is sent directly to me, email regarding projects that need immediate attention etc., land up in folder ~/mbox.
5. So when I launch emacs/vm on my desktop, the above is all I need to deal with at any given moment.
6. I typically read Auto-filed mailing lists using emacs/vm about once a day or less — I use package mspools to get a quick overview of the state of those mail folders.

See gnus-prepare.el for my gnus configuration for accessing GMail via imap. That configuration is setup to access multiple GMail accounts.

1. I see each GMail label as a separate group in GNUS.
2. I only sync high-priority labels — this works well even over slow WIFI connections while on the road. As an example, the afore-mentioned to-mobile GMail label is a high-priority group.
3. Module gm-nnir defines a GNUS/GMail extension that enables one to search GMail using GMail's search operators — that is my prefered means of quickly finding email messages using search. This is very fast since the search happens server-side, and only email headers are retrieved when displaying the search hits.
4. Note that this solution is not laptop/mobile specific — I use this setup for searching GMail from my desktop as well.

1. I use compose-mail to compose email.
2. I optionally activate orgtbl-mode and/or orgstruct-mode if editing structured content within the email body.
3. I send email out using the setup in gm-smtp.el.