Mail Clients and Editors

My favorite mail client is mutt, and my editor-of-choice is GNU
Emacs. The two play quite nicely together, and I still use them for
personal mail, via a console SSH connection. This line in .muttrc
does the trick:

set editor="emacsclient %s"

Coupled with post.el (which is already in Debian as the package
post- el), an emacs minor mode that kicks in automatically when it
sees a mutt temp file in a buffer, and email is quite painless.

Work is a different story, calendaring, obscure formats and
attachments make using those two awkward at best, especially in a
remote console. At some point you'll have to respond to an invite,
or view some bloated binary attachment. Gmail works OK, but can be
slow and does not support external IMAP accounts, not an ideal
situation for me. So far, I've found the only (non-outlook) mail
client that handles everything reasonably well is thunderbird 3.1
with the calendaring plugin. Of course, its builtin editor is
atrocious, it can't handle quoted text, and always likes to re-
format text for you (no pasting code snippets in email). I found a
reasonable compromise with the 'external editor' plugin for
thunderbird [0], coupled with tbemail.el [1]. You just use
'emacsclient' in the external editor options dialog. It works quite
well.

Below are links to local copies ([2], [3]) in case the main sources
ever disappear.

[0] http://globs.org/articles.php?lng=en&pg=2
[1] http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~mp26/download/tbemail.el
[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/slugmax/code/tbemail.el
[3] gopher://sdf.org:70/9/users/slugmax/code/exteditor_v090.xpi

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