Background

For a long time I used Gnus to read email and news. Emails accessed over IMAP and news over NNTP. This setup was heavy and it started looking that the development is mostly halted. The core Gnus hasn't changed for a long time. As I'm not that good with emacs lisp, I was at a dead end.

I did look for a replacement for Gnus at this point, but didn't find anything even closely as usable.

News

I noticed was that by using NNTP directly it was really hard to access the system from laptop and work. To access news nicely remotely I needed a protocol that would allow storing the read state at server side. This protocol clearly was IMAP. As I were already using it for email, using it also for news would simplify the client side needs.

I didn't find any usable IMAP to NNTP gateway so I wrote my own. The result can now be found from

http://gitorious.org/inapnews

Mail

Then came the question what to do for Gnus. As I still didn't find any usable replacement for it, I started thinking of writing my own.

One of the biggest reason for using Gnus was the possibility to customize it. I was able to affect the user interface in many ways. From this came the first design principle, write a library and then the application could be only light personalized user interface layer.

The second design principle was to try to reuse things others have written.

The result can now be found from

http://gitorious.org/txdiymail

and my application using it

http://gitorious.org/inmail

Future

I am using these for real, so I will continue to work with them. If interest from others appears, I might do things like write documentation. Feel free to send email to the address below.