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I'm trying to learn Emacs, and I think that getting gmail right in it would be cool. I've tried a but of tutorials online, but I couldn't figure out what a lot of them were talking about. A lot of them listed elisp code but didn't tell where to put it, and others just didn't work (they created errors). All I really want is to send and receive email - folders and smtp(?) are completely optional.

Does anyone know a good way of doing this?

Edit: I found http://www.gohome.org/wl/doc/wl%5Ftoc.html to be helpful in figuring out Wanderlust.

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Why do people insist so much on doing other things than editing text, with Emacs? This has always amazed me ;) –  Gnoupi Nov 12 '09 at 13:45
Emacs- not just an editor, an operating system! –  kmarsh Nov 12 '09 at 13:50
This is built in: C-q C-p C-x fgh 2 99z {Return} :P –  Phoshi Nov 15 '09 at 18:08
Emacs Gnus is an outstanding email client. –  Richard Hoskins Nov 15 '09 at 20:19
@Gnoupi. Emacs is a software development platform that promotes plain text/keyboard user interfaces (sometimes called "text user interfaces"). It contrasts with Java and .NET that promote graphical user interfaces. –  Uday Reddy Apr 28 '12 at 8:07
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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

I've had success using wanderlust. This is a good tutorial for setting it up:


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I have it setup as a gnus secondary source. In .gnus.el I have:

  '(nnimap "gmail"
    (nnimap-address "imap.gmail.com")
    (nnimap-server-port 993)
    (nnimap-stream ssl)
    (nnimap-authinfo-file "~/.authinfo.gpg")

and in .authinfo.gpg I have:

machine "gmail" imap.gmail.com login username@gmail.com password trustno1

You'll need to enable imap on your accounts to make it work. .authinfo.gpg is gpg encrypted (for password privacy) and I have the easypg package installed to decrypt it on demand.

I send email locally, so you'll have to look at emacswiki.org to work out how to send it via gmail's servers.

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Checkout Nathaniel's posts on GMail with Emacs at nflath.com/2009/10/gmail-from-emacs and nflath.com/2009/10/more-gmail-with-emacs –  Török Gábor Nov 12 '09 at 14:24
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