I think you misunderstand. Though I've not set up email myself, I believe most email tools export their actual operations to an external tool (gnus may be an ex

I think you misunderstand. Though I've not set up email myself, I believe most email tools export their actual operations to an external tool (gnus may be an excpetion, not sure). I know for a fact that magit, the git interface, delegates directly to git. For source file tags and tag searching it delegates to an external tagger. I don't think it does as much as you might think.