EmacsWiki: Category View Mail (original) (raw)

ViewMail (VM) is a mail reader that runs on GNU Emacs and XEmacs.

As of the summer of 2024, the VM project has been rebooted on GitLab at https://gitlab.com/emacs-vm/vm. We are looking for contributors and users.

VM is very well documented. It comes with a fine set of info pages, and there are two EmacsNewsgroups dealing with VM. These pages attempt to distill some of the useful information from the other sources.

Getting Started

• ViewMailQuickStart
• ViewMailSevenQuickStart – old quick-start for version 7.19

VM Customization

• ViewMailCustomization – basic customization
• ViewMailAndImap – using VM with IMAP folders
• ViewMailAndPop – using VM with Pop folders
• ViewMailAndMime – customizing Mime support
• ViewMailVirtualFolders – using virtual folders
• ViewMailOtherCustomizations – nifty tricks &c. for VM.

VM and Other Packages

• ViewMailAndBbdb – using VM with BbdbMode (for an address book functionality)
• ViewMailAndMailCrypt – using VM with MailCrypt (for encrypting/decrypting email)
• ViewMailAndWThreeM – using VM with emacs-w3m (for reading HTML mail)

VM Addons

• ViewMailAddons

VM Wishlist

• ViewMailWishlist – discuss ideas for VM and their feasibility.
• ViewMailHeadersOnly – blueprint for an experimental headers-only mode.

Documentation

• Info manual on VM version 7, Kyle Jones at Wonderworks, May 2003. Even though it is out of date, this continues to be good reference for the basics. See the info manual in your VM distribution for up to date documentation.
• VM FAQ, Brian Gorka, Samuel Mikes and Gregory Neil Shapiro at Wonderworks, February 2001.
• FAQ: Using VM with Procmail, Samuel Mikes at Wonderworks, April 1998. Explanation of integrating VM with external mail filtering.

External Links

• Official ViewMail Website
• ViewMail on Savannah
• ViewMail on Launchpad
• Old ViewMail website
• V. L. Simpson, Emacs and Email: The VM Mail Package, Linux Gazette, December 2004. A very nice tutorial, which is still valuable despite its age.
• Phil Sung, VM configuration and workflow, September 13, 2008. Nice article on setting up VM.
• Arik Mitschang, emacs: VM Mail Reader, December 29, 2009. Help for setting up VM. Dead link --PasJa
• Josh Braun, Setting up a VM Mail Client in Emacs, June 22, 2011. Basic but adequate instructions for setting up VM.
• Robert Adesam, Issue with VM and IMAP over SSL stunnel, June 23, 2011. Reports that stunnel version 4.35 does not work correctly. Also mentioned here and here.
• Joe Bayes, vm: Emacs's mail reader, date unknown. A simple introduction to using VM.
• Alley Stoughton, Support for Using Emacs/VM for Reading and Sending Mail on a Mac, undated.
• Bill Clementson, VM and Gmail Setup for Dummies, October 23, 2006. Although a bit dated, and uses POP for Gmail, it has useful information on setting up starttls.
• Andreas Viklund, Configuring Emacs for GMail's SMTP over SSL, April 26, 2007. Another article on configuring Emacs SMTP for GMail starttls.
• XEmacs, XEmacs 21.5 FAQ section on Connecting to the Internet, includes FAQ’s on VM.
• Francois Flueret, VM configuration file
• Glen Morris, Computer stuff (includes VM configuration file).
• Umesh Nair, VM configuration file.
• Eli Barzilay, VM configuration file on Github.
• VM and the FSF, Sep 22, 2000. bug-gnu-emacs mailing list discussion about why VM is not included with Emacs.

CategoryMail