[xemacs-hg @ 2004-12-05 08:48:12 by ben] The section on Troubleshooting (now 2.3) has been completely written and includes a lot of stuff that is not properly documented anywhere else. A fair amount of obsolete info has been deleted and I've incorporated the comments that people (mostly Stephen T) made. Former chapter 3 has been split up in two, one pertaining to basic I/O and the other to external I/O. What were formerly chapters 5 and 6 no longer exist as such; the info in them has been distributed across various other chapters. Old chapter 4 got split up, part going to the new chapter 4 on external I/O and part going to the new chapter 5 on the Internet. In this new chapter, stuff not pertaining to a specific package (e.g. VM or GNUS) was taken out of package-specific sections and a general mail section was constituted. Part of old chapter 5 remains in a new chapter 6 devoted to Emacs Lisp and other advanced stuff, and a section from old chapter 3 on basic init-file Lisp and some stuff from old chapter 5 on Info. The rest of chapter 5 was just misc and has gotten scattered to the winds (mostly in chapters 3 and 4). Old chapter 6 has also gotten quite scattered; there is no longer any section specifically devoted to Windows except one of the Installation sections (along with a section specfically devoted to Unix), and the rest has moved to join the appropriate non-Windows-specific section elsewhere. A lot of chapters had their sections rearranged and likewise for sections having entries rearranged, with the intention that the new arrangement should be more natural. In general I hope that stuff should be much easier to locate. I also rewrote the entries on the relation between XEmacs and GNU Emacs on the authors of XEmacs, including lots of info on who wrote specific subsections. However, this history is certainly not complete; I hope people will look over this and fix it up as necessary.

@node Reading Mail, Calendar/Diary, Sending Mail, Top
@chapter Reading Mail
@cindex mail
@cindex message

XEmacs provides several mail-reading packages.  Each one comes with
its own manual, which is included in each package.

The recommended mail-reading package for new users is VM.  VM works
with standard Unix-mail-format folders and was designed as a replacement
for the older Rmail.

XEmacs also provides a sophisticated and comfortable front-end to the
MH mail-processing system, called @samp{MH-E}.  Unlike in other
mail programs, folders in MH are stored as file-system directories,
with each message occupying one (numbered) file.  This facilitates
working with mail using shell commands, and many other features of
MH are also designed to integrate well with the shell and with
shell scripts.  Keep in mind, however, that in order to use MH-E
you must have the MH mail-processing system installed on your
computer.

The @dfn{Everything including the kitchen sink} package @samp{Gnus} is
also available as an XEmacs package.  Gnus also handles Usenet articles
as well as mail.

@samp{MEW} (Messaging in the Emacs World) is another mail-reading
package available for XEmacs.

Finally, XEmacs provides the Rmail package.  Rmail is (currently)
the only mail reading package distributed with FSF GNU Emacs, and is
powerful in its own right.  However, it stores mail folders in a
special format called @samp{Babyl}, that is incompatible with all
other frequently-used mail programs.  A utility program is provided
for converting Babyl folders to standard Unix-mail format; however,
unless you already have mail in Babyl-format folders, you should
consider using Gnus, VM, or MH-E instead.