vm team mailing list archive

[Manuel Carro <mcarro@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Ok, thanks for letting us know.  
> 
> Since you have now used both VM and Gnus extensively, perhaps you can
> give us some idea of the pros and cons of the two?

The biggest cons of VM was that it started to be brittle and needed
manual repairing of mailboxes.  This may certainly be caused by
ill-formed messages which VM was not shielded against.  A minor problem
was that it was a bit slow with large (say, 1000 messages onwards)
mailboxes.  This could be alleviated by making it work with a back-end
based on the maildir format (which effectively increases disk usage, but
which also speeds up syncronization using e.g. Unison).  Otherwise I was
quite happy with VM.

GNUs is much more complex.  It has around 600 user-callable functions.
Its idea is that actual Usenet news, RSS feeds, mail (either read
remotely through IMAP or dowloaded to the local disk in a variety of
formats) has the same interface based on classifying things in groups
(it can be a single, huge group).  This needs a mind change, and, to
this date, I still wonder whether I have received or not a given
message.  But it is bullet-proof and very powerful; however, configuring
it is not really straightforward or easy to understand.  And changing a
configuration which works can, in my experience, lead to strange
phenomena.  However, erasing a message difficult enough to make sure
that they will not be erased by mistake.

My recommendation would be: if someone is happy with VM, trying GNUs is
probably not worth the effort.  For people who are really really
mail-driven and are not aware of configuring a complex package in Emacs
Lisp, it may be something to try out.

-- 
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Manuel Carro --- Facultad de Informática -- U. Politécnica de Madrid (UPM)  |
|       Campus de Montegancedo --- E-28660 Boadilla del Monte --- Spain        |
|                Phone: +34-913363747 --- FAX: +34-913363669                   |