“Once they do invest the time, Emacs becomes a place from which
some will never return. Built in to this “text editor” is a news
reader, a few mail clients, a calendar, appointment book, Tetris,
an FTP client, a Telnet client, a web browser, and more. You can
climb into an Emacs session and, depending on your temperment and
willingness to embrace Lisp, never have to leave. Some find this
profoundly disturbing, others comforting.”
“GNUS has earned a following not only as a good newsreader, but
as a mail client and a back-end to several other ‘net-based
resources. A few new things have popped up. It now, for instance,
has integrated MIME support. Combined with another new feature (the
ability to display graphics in your Emacs window), it’s possible
for GNUS to show inline MIME attachments (pictures), and Emacs also
has sound support now, making it possible to play .wav files from
within Emacs.”
“This new MIME functionality frees GNUS and Emacs in general
from relying on external helper programs to display graphics.
According to the documentation, Emacs supports PNG, XPM, TIF, JPEG,
and a few other graphics formats, all of which are compile-time
options.”
“GNUS also has better multi-lingual support. If you receive a
message written with Japanese characters, it prints Japanese
characters.”
“Finally, GNUS also now supports IMAP and some interesting new
backends, such as Slashdot (which allows you to browse the site as
if it’s an NNTP feed) and support for some popular web-based mail
services (such as HotMail and Yahoo!).”