Wanderlust vs gnus
When comparing Wanderlust vs gnus, the Slant community recommends Wanderlust for most people. In the question“What are the best email clients for emacs?” Wanderlust is ranked 2nd while gnus is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Wanderlust is:
Has enough UI polish to make day-to-day use bearable. Shows nested folders, threaded conversations and Face/X-Face headers etc. It also has decent keybindings. ![](http://mihai.bazon.net/articles/emacs/wanderlust-email-client/wl-full.png)
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Pros
Pro Nice UI
Has enough UI polish to make day-to-day use bearable. Shows nested folders, threaded conversations and Face/X-Face headers etc. It also has decent keybindings.
http://mihai.bazon.net/articles/emacs/wanderlust-email-client/wl-full.png
Pro Fantastic IMAP support
The key differentiator for Wanderlust is it's reliable and fast IMAP support.
It also supports a wide range of other protocols:
- NNTP
- POP(POP3/APOP)
- MH
- Maildir
Pro Integrates nicely with existing Emacs packages
From mihai.bazon.net:
I'm currently using it with BBDB (for keeping my address book), Flyspell (spell checking as you type), Mailcrypt (digital signatures and encryption, here's my public key btw).
Can be integrated with Bogofilter, SpamAssassin, and probably whatever you want for spam filtering.
Pro Customizable with Lisp
The implementation is in elisp only, but allows you to customize the client in any way you wish.
Pro Everything is customizable
Yep, really. From Outlook-mode, where Outlook-typical TOFU mails are “repaired”, up to a high-sophisticated scoring and SPAM filtering, footer lines with quotes, rules depending on the recipient, MIME formatting, boxquotes, etc.
Pro It supports IMAP and POP3
… but you can use DavMail to connect to Exchange server via EWS.
Cons
Con Freezes Emacs when checking for new mail
From mihai.bazon.net:
Because Elisp is not a multithreaded language, it kind of freezes while checking for new mail. This can be bad if you're using the same Emacs instance for other purposes, like, writing code. :-) Not the case for me—I don't mind starting a new Emacs instance especially for WL; until one week ago I was using Thunderbird, which needs tons of RAM. Emacs is a lot lighter.
Con Difficult documentation
Originally a newsgroup reader, so its documentation uses Usenet terminology for everything -- which is confusing.