After over 12 years of using Gnus as my mail reader, I’ve decided to move on. In the past few years Gnus had become increasingly difficult to use. Getting it to display HTML or multipart messages properly was a challenge. I’m sure there probably would have been a way to get it to work but I’m losing patience with having to delve into badly documented software in order to get it to do things that should work right out of the box. A good deal of the reasons I had to use Gnus have over the years become quite moot. One major advantage that Gnus used to have was the ability to use it over a text connexion but I have not had to do that for years now. I still use telnet but only for issuing administrative commands, not for reading email.

So I’ve moved to Gnome’s Evolution. It does everything I used Gnus for. It also handles HTML and multipart messages intelligently right out of the box. Moreover, and that’s very important to me, Evolution integrates nicely with my Palm Pilot. That’s something Gnus never came close to doing. When I was using Gnus, I also had to use Jpilot in parallel to work with appointments and memos on my laptop. Now, I can just use Evolution for all of this. The only thing that I found Evolution does not do so well is archiving emails automatically in a sensible way. I had to write my own filter scripts to do that in the way I want it but that’s not a big deal.