Re: How to set up gnus email for novices with little mastery.

[Tim McNamara]

Don Saklad <dsaklad@nestle.csail.mit.edu> writes:

> A relative novice using emacs rmail does not have enough mastery to
> set up the dotfile for gnus email nor to do whatever other
> accompanying tasks to get gnus email up and running. What hints, tips
> and pointers are there for such users interested in trying gnus email
> that do not require more than a few moments of study through a steep
> that learning curve so perceived ?...

I don't know, I was able to set up Gnus while pretty much a novice
user of Emacs.  It's a powerful application, so there's going to be
some learning curve, of course.  However, if one is running Emacs
with a GUI most of the operations can be done via menus with a mouse-
so that simplifies the thing right away.

I think it's having to write a LISP file to set the "preferences" for
operation that throws people.  People who are experienced Emacs users
are already familiar with this, but people new to Emacs are not.  The
Options > Customize Emacs menu choices are very helpful, though.  

The simplest thing would be to have some sample .gnus files into which
people could plug their information for their POP or IMAP servers,
e-mail address, user name, etc.  Most e-mail applications have a
GUI-driven window through which this information can be added; if Gnus
has this, I haven't seen it- but then I haven't looked for it, either.