"Emacs comes with a nice terminal emulator called ansi-term. Using M-x ansi-term, you can run shells and other terminal programs from within emacs, and the emulation is good enough even for 'graphical' console programs. For example, I am using the mutt mailer and slrn news reader with ansi-term. I could of course use some native emacs program for news and mail (e.g,, gnus), but in this case, I prefer the external ones (I'll discuss that in some later entry). However, I really like these external programs to run inside emacs - it makes my task management easier. YMMV, of course..."