www.sixfingeredman.net
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05.07

Today we learn about Gnus and X-Face.

X-Face is sort of like low-tech AOL buddy icons for email, invented by James Ashton in 1990 (the Dark Ages). You get black, white, and a space 48x48 pixels to express yourself -- then, after dancing naked smeared with blood and sacrificing a goat, you hopefully convince your mail/news client to compress this image and attach it to your messages so the similarly-initiated can see your handsome face.

Oddly enough, this is not supported by any popular Windows clients, though if you're desperate there is X-Face display software, and I hear Mozilla might someday support it.

I find it funny that this nifty, geeky toy has been sitting around for the last ten years in relative obscurity. Perhaps it's doomed by the fact that setting it up is more difficult than point-and-click, or that you only get black-and-white. Or maybe nobody really wants to look at pictures of nerds?

The second part of this story is Gnus. I'd been happily using mutt to do my email, but after experiencing the power of Emacs, I wondered whether I could harness this power to do my email even more happily. Well, turns out I could. Getting it set up like I wanted took 3 days, a dozen visits to gnu.emacs.gnus, and promising my first-born to Satan, but now that's all done I'm a happy camper.

Why? What did I gain? Well -- don't laugh -- but not much concretely. For one thing, I can use BBDB (Big Brother Data Base), a sort of addressbook which can read over your shoulder and take notes (in my case, it keeps track of what newsgroups I've seen someone in, what their last email to me was, what names they use to send messages, stuff like that). I also get to do mail and usenet news in the same interface. Well, Outlook can do that, but Gnus goes one better -- I can treat mailing lists just like newsgroups. Then there's the archival/expiration system, which I have set up so most of my emails get cleaned up and archived two weeks after I read them. And the X-Faces, of course.

Anyways, it's not in itself impressive but the potential is great -- Gnus gives you complete control over your mail. Here's a screenshot of my setup.