Emacs comes with several options for reading and writing mail. These are documented in the manual, and the choice of which method to use depends on personal taste. There are some issues specific to Windows however, related to the fact that Windows machines do not have the mail infrastructure that is commonly installed on other platforms, so mail will not work without some configuration.
For outgoing mail, you will need to use smtpmail.el which allows Emacs to talk directly to SMTP mail servers. This is included with Emacs, and can be set up as follows:
(setq user-full-name "Your full name")
(setq user-mail-address "Your@email.address")
(setq smtpmail-default-smtp-server "domain.name.of.your.smtp.server")
(setq send-mail-command 'smtpmail-send-it) ; For mail-mode (Rmail)
(setq message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it) ; For message-mode (Gnus)
Note that if you want to change the name of the SMTP server after
smtpmail is loaded, then you'll need to change
smtpmail-smtp-server.
If you are experiencing problems with sending large messages, check
the value of the variable smtpmail-debug-info. If it is non-nil, you
should set it to nil:
For incoming mail using the Rmail package and a POP3 server, you will need the following configuration:
(setenv "MAILHOST" "domain.name.of.your.pop3.server")
(setq rmail-primary-inbox-list '("po:your logon id"))
(setq rmail-pop-password-required t)
Although Gnus started life as a Usenet news reader, it also makes a good mail reader, particularly if you subscribe to a lot of mailing lists, or you want to use IMAP rather than POP3, which is not supported by Rmail. Because of the varied ways of setting up Gnus, it is best that you read the Gnus manual, and seek help on news:gnu.emacs.gnus if needed.
Other options for reading mail in Emacs include VM, MH-E and Wanderlust. All of these require lisp or executable code that does not come with Emacs, so you should seek help where you obtained the packages from if you want to use them.
In your HOME directory create a file called .mailcap, with contents like the following:
application/zip "C:/Program Files/7-Zip/7zFM.exe"
video/* "C:/Program Files/VideoLAN/VLC/vlc.exe"
Warning: Associating MIME types with start or other generic Windows commands to open arbitrary files might seem like a good idea, but it leaves your system as open to attack as Outlook Express was at its worst. Especially dangerous is associating application/* or */* in this way.
Windows built in FTP client can be used with ange-ftp. Ange-ftp is the Emacs package that provides FTP connectivity to tramp, a multi-protocol remote file access package for Emacs that is enabled by default.
The Windows FTP client does have problems with some firewalls, due to
lack of passive mode support, so you may want to try an alternative
ftp client instead. Make sure that the client you are trying is in
your PATH before the default Windows client, or rename the
default Windows client to avoid it getting in the way. Alternatively
you can customize ange-ftp-ftp-program-name to the full path to
the version you are trying. See Other useful ports.
Tramp can use a number of protocols to connect to remote machines to
read files and even run commands on those files remotely. A popular
one is ssh. As well as Cygwin versions of openssh, you can use
PuTTY's command line plink program as the ssh client. The relevant
methods to use in tramp-default-method or
tramp-default-method-alist for these options are:
scp Uses scp for copying, ssh for shell operations.
scp1 scp with forced SSH protocol version 1
scp2 scp with forced SSH protocol version 2
ssh Uses ssh with encoding on stdin/stdout for file transfer.
ssh1 ssh with forced SSH protocol version 1
ssh2 ssh with forced SSH protocol version 2
pscp Uses pscp for copying, plink for shell operations.
pscp1 pscp, with forced SSH protocol version 1
pscp2 pscp, with forced SSH protocol version 2
plink Uses plink with encoding on stdin/stdout for file transfer.
plink1 plink with forced SSH protocol version 1
plink2 plink with forced SSH protocol version 2
To use telnet-mode on Windows, you need a telnet client that uses stdin and stdout for input and output. The default Windows client is a Windows application, and will not work as a subprocess. Several options exist, but information that was formerly in this FAQ is out of date now, so no concrete pointers are available.