Mail Archives: djgpp/2000/02/24/08:45:20
On Thu, 24 Feb 2000, Willem Bekker wrote:
> I have a standard dial up account with an internet service provider. I
> would like to use emacs to send and receive email and maybe news as well.
> Can anybody tell me what I could download and what would be necessary to
> write (either as a stand alone c program or as a lisp package).
You need Emacs.
> It seems
> (if I am not mistaken) that you cannot use the packages distributed with
> emacs in dos directly.
You *can* use the DJGPP version of Emacs to read your mail, provided that
you have a way to access your mailbox as a file. For example, Unix mail
servers usually maintain the mailbox on a disk in a special format; Emacs
knows how to read that format, so if you can access that file, you are
done. The relevant command is `M-x rmail'; to tell Emacs to read mail
from a file of your choice, type `C-u g', and then the file name at the
prompt.
This method has a disadvantage: you cannot easily reply to your mail.
About the only way is to save the replies on disk, then import them from
some mailer and send. This is a bit awkward.
Alternatively, you can download and install NTEmacs, a native Win32
compile of Emacs. That version has built-in support email and news
groups, I suggest to use the Gnus package (which is part of Emacs) for
both. NTEmacs can be downloaded from GNU ftp sites. The disadvantage
is that you cannot debug or recompile it without having MSVC development
tools installed. The Emacs FAQ (included with the DJGPP port) has some
pointers to NTEmacs-related sites and FAQs.
Of course, given enough motivation, you could make the network support
work with the DJGPP version of Emacs as well ;-).
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