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Using Emacs for reading mail - Part 1
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Emacs is, as you might know, a powerful texteditor with an advanced scripting language which allows for extending it to your needs. This has been used (and misused) on several occasions to enhance Emacs beyond the use of a simple texteditor. One of these extensions are the Gnus message reader. Gnus itself is also huge and powerful and that's were the trouble begins. In this article I'll give narrowed example on how to configure Emacs (or Gnus) to be used as a mail reader. For those of you who feel brave I suggest you go directly to the online manual or download it in other formats. For the rest of you, who like to spend the rest of this week doing other things than reading the manual, I suggest reading on.
Setup
The first thing you need to do is to download and install Gnus since the version included in your standard (X)Emacs distribution is probably old. Installation should be simple, for instance if you downloaded Gnus 5.8.7 you do:
tar xvfz gnus.tar.gz
cd gnus-5.8.7
./configure
make |
if you're using XEmacs you need to change the make into
This should byte-compile Gnus for your Emacs. XEmacs users should also download the glyph package to get some icons for their mail reader (Emacs will only use the startup image). Unpack the glyph archive and move it to the gnus main directory and rename it to etc.
For instance if you downloaded etc 0.27 and Gnus 5.8.7 you would write:
tar xvfz etc.tar.gz
mv etc-0.27 gnus-5.8.7/etc |
The next thing you need to decide is where you want gnus to be installed, my recommendation is /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/gnus for Emacs users and /usr/share/xemacs/site-lisp/gnus for XEmacs users, if you use both you should install it to /usr/share/gnus.
The reason for the subdirectory gnus is that it makes it easier to upgrade to newer versions since gnus consists of several files. However if you feel strongly about it, you can simply install all files in /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp or /usr/share/xemacs/site-lisp, but not /usr/share.
For instance to install Gnus 5.8.7 for Emacs do:
mv gnus-5.8.7 /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/gnus |
Now you need to tell Emacs where it can locate Gnus, this is done by editing your local Emacs config, located in your home directory. Edit ~/.emacs with your favourite editor and add these lines:
(setq load-path (cons "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/gnus/lisp" load-path)) |
If no problems occurred Gnus should be properly installed and ready to be used. So I suggest you fire up Emacs and test it. Once Emacs is up and running you should do:
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Gnus logo
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For those of you who are not used to Emacs this means: Press Meta(Sometimes Alt or left Windows key) and hold( For those of you without a Meta key press ESC and release), press x, enter gnus and press Return or Enter.
If you see some graphics or text resembling a Gnu you should be ready for the next step.
The last thing you should know of is the file .gnus in your home directory. It is used for configuring Gnus since it is read each time it is started, therefore I suggest all the Emacs-lisp code I write be put into this file, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
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