Re: thoughts on spam

["Matt Armstrong" <matt+dated+1007584536.5875f3@lickey.com>]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:
>
>> * "Matt Armstrong" <matt+dated+1007567947.77c13d@lickey.com>  on Mon, 05 Nov 2001
>> | Of course, if I dumped every software package that ever screwed me
>> | over due to a mis-configuration, I'd have dumped Gnus years ago.  ;-)
>>
>> Let's just say that there is a difference between oneself being reamed by a
>> bug and an entire company of some 350 employees being reamed by a feature.
>
> Matt, has gnus actually ever lost mail for you... I've never heard any
> one say that?

Gnus has certainly lost mail on me.  Just recently mail was
disappearing on me when my servers/mail-sources were all screwed up
through no fault of my own.  Mind you I've always been running the
development versions since September Gnus, so I do invite this kind of
risk (and I backup all mail before it ever gets to Gnus, so no real
harm has ever been done).

But Gnus is currently broken in its default configuration.  If you
follow the instructions in the manual, you'll have an "archive" group
and your default nnml group living in ~/Mail.

Then if you subsequently do a gnus-server-regenerate-server ('g' from
the server buffer) of your nnml server, it'll troll through all of
~/Mail, including your archive dirs, and try to make groups out of
them.  Insanity ensues.  Things get broken.

If you do a "B c nnfolder:foo" and create a group that way, the 'foo'
folder will end up in ~/Mail.  ~/Mail/active will have a foo entry put
into it, and nnml will start thinking it is an nnml group.  Things get
broken.

Neither of the above actions elicit any warnings when I do them, yet
they leave stuff horribly broken.  It was when I was trying these
things out that I was losing mail (stuff was in the Incoming... files,
but in none of the mail groups).

Recent threads suggested a way that Gnus can detect when mail backends
start sharing the same directories and issue an error.  I hope it gets
implemented someday -- my elisp isn't good enough to do it myself.
;-)


> I have never lost mail with it since my first usages around
> quassia-15 or so, and I am probably one of the most sloppy and least
> informed of its users.

Admittedly, I was *trying* to break things when doing what I describe
above.  Still, I wasn't doing anything that wasn't easily doable with
a few key strokes, or off a menu.  I wasn't doing anything that
obscure.


> The only time I remember actually losing mail while using gnus, it
> was from unleashing a really stupid rogue `rm -rf' that leveled News
> Mail and every other non-dot file in ~/

Who hasn't?  :-)


-- 
matt