About two years ago I wrote an entry about how my switch from reading email with exmh to reading it in GNU Emacs with MH-E had affected my email reading behavior more than I expected. As time has passed and I've made more extensive customizations to my MH-E environment , this has continued. One of the recent ways I've noticed is that I'm slowly making more and more use of the fact that GNU Emacs is a multi-window editor ('multi-frame' in Emacs terminology) and reading email with MH-E inside it still leaves me with all of the basic Emacs facilities . Specifically, I can create several Emacs windows (frames) and use this to be working in multiple MH folders at the same time.

Back when I used exmh extensively, I mostly had MH pull my email into the default 'inbox' folder, where I dealt with it all at once. Sometimes I'd wind up pulling some new email into a separate folder, but exmh only really giving me a view of a single folder at a time combined with a system administrator's need to be regularly responding to email made that a bit awkward. At first my use of MH-E mostly followed that; I had a single Emacs MH-E window (frame) and within that window I switched between folders. But lately I've been creating more new windows when I want to spend time reading a non-inbox folder, and in turn this has made me much more willing to put new email directly into different ( MH ) folders rather than funnel it all into my inbox.

(I don't always make a new window to visit another folder, because I don't spend long on many of my non-inbox folders for new email. But for various mailing lists and so on, reading through them may take at least a bit of time so it's more likely I'll decide I want to keep my MH inbox folder still available.)

One thing that makes this work is that MH-E itself has reasonably good support for displaying and working on multiple folders at once. There are probably ways to get MH-E to screw this up and run MH commands with the wrong MH folder as the current folder, so I'm careful that I don't try to have MH-E carry out its pending MH operations in two MH-E folders at the same time. There are areas where MH-E is less than ideal when I'm also using command-line MH tools, because MH-E changes MH's global notion of the current folder any time I have it do things like show a message in some folder. But at least MH-E is fine (in normal circumstances) if I use MH commands to change the current folder; MH-E will just switch it back the next time I have it show another message.

PS: On a purely pragmatic basis, another change in my email handling is that I'm no longer as irritated with HTML emails because GNU Emacs is much better at displaying HTML than exmh was. I've actually left my MH-E setup showing HTML by default, instead of forcing multipart/alternative email to always show the text version (my exmh setup). GNU Emacs and MH-E aren't up to the level of, say, Thunderbird, and sometimes this results in confusing emails, but it's better than it was.

(The situation that seems tricky for MH-E is that people sometimes include inlined images, for example screenshots as part of problem reports, and MH-E doesn't always give any indication that it's even omitting something.)