Products · Product

Gnus

Raised as a usability problem by 15 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 16 threads.

Ranked by people · period

This year (last 12 months)Last 5 yearsSince the beginning (2007)

No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.

No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.

1
Hard to figure out how to configure itUnreviewed
3 people since the beginning · 3 threads

Every issue, all time, most people first

Hard to figure out how to configure itUnreviewed
3 people since 2016, in 2 different years · none this year
20102026
- Hard to set up, according to the commenter2017-06-16
- Hard to figure out how to configure it2016-12-08
- Hard to configure and understand, and does not work on iPhone2016-07-25
Something wrong here?

This list counts all time; the period switch above only changes the ranking. Each issue is a group of similar complaints raised by at least 3 people in 3 different months and threads. Each line under an issue is Claude Haiku's summary of one of its latest comments, not a quote; follow it to read the comment on Hacker News.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 18 complaints

Gnus is dog slow and unusable with over 100k messages2026-02-09
Cache corruption makes the client unusable and repair is impractical2023-05-21
Takes about ten minutes to start and hours to index, unusable without nativecomp2023-05-21
Gnus is slow and overcomplicated when used only for e-mail2020-06-04
Configuring Emacs packages like Gnus and org-mode takes hours and is indecipherable2020-05-08
Takes over an hour and a half to open with large mailbox2019-06-04
Gnus is very slow at threading messages compared to Thunderbird2018-12-03
Gnus is quite slow and its internals are messy2018-07-20
Gnus code is messy and somewhat slow to use compared to alternatives2017-09-30
Threading messages is very slow with over 10000 headers2017-09-24
Silently replaces a valid user-set mail address with a placeholder string in headers2017-09-23
Hard to set up, according to the commenter2017-06-16
Hard to figure out how to configure it2016-12-08
Hard to configure and understand, and does not work on iPhone2016-07-25
Nnimap is unbearably slow and quirky to use with Gmail2014-10-28
Memory balloons with small maildirs and IMAP access feels slow2014-08-03
Emacs becomes unresponsive while Gnus performs network I/O2011-10-09
New search features are undocumented, so users must read source or mailing lists2010-12-12