Re: wanderlust and mew - which might be best choice for me?

[Erik Hetzner <egh@e6h.org>]

At Wed, 09 May 2012 13:56:02 -0600,
Ken Gunderson wrote:
> 
> Hello:
> 
> No, it's not my intention to start a religious debate. I am, however, 
> having a difficult time finding much of anything about these two mua 
> modes on the net.  I have used various gui clients in the past but they 
> seem bent on ever increasing bloat.  Nor am I a fan of webmail. Mutt 
> would be my default "go to" TUI based mua but figured I'd investigate 
> mail in emacs. I need to manage multiple IMAP accounts with lots of 
> folders. I store my mail server side so I can access from multiple 
> machines - typically workstations with 24x7 connections. Hence offline 
> imap stores, pop, maildir, usenet, etc. are pretty much not even on my 
> radar. I like my mail in ascii but also need to be able to view 
> html'ized nonsense and open various attachments.  My background is as a 
> sysadmin rather than programmer and I don't want to have to become an 
> e/lisp expert just to get my mua configured. I've also only recently 
> switched to emacs so there's still a big learning curve ahead.
> 
> Mew appears to be more actively maintained and has better documentation 
> but it also appears that Wanderlust may be preferred of the two. Perhaps 
> because of MH support and allegedly superior IMAP support.  Such 
> references are pretty dated, however, so I don't know how relevant to 
> current times. Mew and Wanderlust otherwise appear to be pretty similar 
> and I'd appreciate it if someone would compare and contrast their 
> differences and similarities in the context of my use case.

Hi Ken,

I have never used mew seriously, and have not used it for many
years. If you use IMAP, you may prefer wanderlust.

You may find configuration of WL difficult. The mailing list archives
are very helpful. You don’t need to be an elisp expert, but the
flexibility of WL can be overwhelming. I think the documentation is
pretty complete and accurate. The English terminology is different
from many other email readers, but it is mostly the same as mew.

WL is in a difficult situation with regard to maintenance at the
moment, but it is very feature complete and bugs are fixed in the
repositories found on github.

best, Erik

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