Joseph Vidal-Rosset <joseph.vidal.ros...@gmail.com> writes: > 2014/1/8 Nick Dokos <ndo...@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
