Re: Fwd: puzzling org-mime-htmlize

[Nick Dokos <ndokos@gmail.com>]

Joseph Vidal-Rosset <joseph.vidal.rosset@gmail.com> writes:

> 2014/1/8 Nick Dokos <ndokos@gmail.com>
>
>     > Hi Nick,  I apolgize, it's difficult for me to be more complete that I was.
>    
>     You are kidding, right?
>    
> Hi Nick, 
>
> No, I did not kidding, unfortunately. 
>
> I'm replying with gmail, and I am afraid I will give up the project to use Gnus. From yesterday evening, suddenly I have on my
> two computers an error message with gnus: 
>
> 'smtp-server'  not defined. 
>

I saw your other message where FLIM (whatever that is) is identified as
the culprit. One piece of advice: do not install random software
packages without thorough testing. The best way to test is with a
minimal .emacs that just loads the package under test, start a new emacs
with it (emacs -q -l /path/to/min.emacs) and test the heck out of it
before admitting it into the set of trusted packages that you load in
your everyday emacs session. I routinely have three emacs sessions
going: my everyday emacs, a separate one that I use as an IRC client
(running erc) and a third short-lived one for tests.  My everyday emacs
runs for weeks at a time; the irc emacs gets restarted every time I
switch networks (I wish erc would maintain the connections, but they get
dropped); the short-lived one(s) lasts from a few minutes to a few
hours.

> I've of course tried to solve this new problem, with help of archives
> of mailing lists given by Google, all my tentative are at the moment
> unsuccessful... 
>
> It's both boring and irritating. 
>
> The least that I expect from an email client is to work
> correctly. Gnus worked, for sending and receiving emails, and suddenly
> without clear reason, it does not work no more... It is not stable
> because I have not changed .gnus.el ... 
>

... but you installed FLIM, right? That installed its own smtpmail.el
which apparently you picked up in preference to the one that came with
emacs. This is a fairly common mistake.

> I am sorry to have bothered you for nothing, but I am tired and
> disappointed by emailing via emacs. I loose more time in trying to
> configure gnus for my gmail account than in reading and replying to my
> emails... 
>
> I will going to try to improve my use of org-mode, but Gnus is not made for me...
>

Bastien's channeling of Beckett was the perfect answer here, but as
usual I have a few more comments :-)

Gnus is indeed peculiar: I switched to it about 8 months ago and I'm
still not quite comfortable with it. However, although I occasionally
use gmail and thunderbird, I'll take an emacs-based mail client over
them every time: I used mh-e for many years and switched to gnus only
because I wanted an imap server at home - afaik, mh-e (and nmh underneath
it) just did not support that use case.

As a general principle however, you need to decouple your attempts to
use gnus from your attempts to use org. I recently advised somebody not
to use all the blades of the org swiss-army knife at the same time.
Trying to do that in combination with gnus is turning the knife into a
chainsaw (swiss-army chainsaw anyone?)

Do them one at a time: it may seem slow and inefficient to you now, but
it is much more efficient than the alternative - damhikt...

Nick