Re: Gnus v5.2 and GNU Emacs 19.31 Win32

[Andrew Innes <andrewi@harlequin.co.uk>]

On 06 Jun 1996 15:57:25 -0400, Richard Pieri <ratinox@unilab.dfci.harvard.edu> said:
>>>>>>"AI" == Andrew Innes <andrewi@harlequin.co.uk> writes:
>
AI>movemail only reads your inbox (only via POP3 on NT/Win95)
>
>That would do it, then.  Gnus relies on movemail to safely copy the
>inbox to a work file before deleting the inbox.  One workaround is to
>use another program when trying to read from a local spool (the mv
>program in the unix95 archive seems to work; the MS-DOS MOVE.EXE does
>not).  If you are doing this on a "live" filesystem, one that an SMTP
>daemon can write to, do not do this, you could loose mail.

Yup - movemail has the ability to read directly from a mail spool file
as well, with all the proper locking code.  However, this method is
disabled on NT/Win95 precisely because Samba (widely used free software
that lets Windows machines access Unix disks over the network) doesn't
appear to implement the necessary locking calls.

>However, I have now discovered another problem with the ntemacs
>movemail: it converts the incoming mail file (from the POP3 server) to a
>Babyl file, which is a big pain in the behind since Gnus is not geared
>to parse a non-Unix (or MMDF) mail file.  Is this the normal behavior
>for movemail?  Is there any way to disable it (I can't find anything in
>the primary Emacs distribution sources that shows how)?  Or is there a
>replacement for movemail that does not act so -- IMO -- brain-damaged?

Yes, movemail is hard-coded to write the output file in Babyl format,
although it could easily be modified and recompiled to output in a
different format (make sure you call it something other than movemail if
you do that, to avoid confusion).

Curiously, movemail only does this conversion when reading from a POP3
server - when reading a mail spool file directly, it just makes a
verbatim copy.

I'm sure Gnus could be made to borrow some of RMAIL's functions for
parsing Babyl files, if necessary, but modifying movemail itself would
be far simpler.

AndrewI