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

[Ken Gunderson <kgunders@teamcool.net>]

At Wed, 09 May 2012 21:54:13 -0700,
Erik Hetzner wrote:
> 
> 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

Hi Erik:

Good to see that life does still exist in Wanderlust :) 

I decided that Wanderlust looked to be the more featureful of the two and  decided to take it for a test drive. Took more hours than I'd want to admit just to access my one of my accounts. The docs were less than clear regarding .folders file.  At least for me. Found some example files on the 'net and as you may surmise from the headers I at least now have minimal functionality working.  Looks worthy of further exploration. Need to figure out how to wrap at 72 chars though, so pardon the long line length.

Thanks for your perspective-- Ken