Re: set up Gnus to work with a remote system mailserver (with Dovecot?)

[Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>]

Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> For OP, if the mail is actually mbox format in /var/mail/incal, can gnus
> use a tramp specification for the file name?  I.e. maybe something like

> (setq mail-sources '((file :path "/ssh:user@host:/var/mail/incal")))

> might work (untested, of course) but maybe not as it might depend on
> what movemail supports?

In a similar situation, I use the following configuration:

(setq mail-sources
   '((file :prescript "ssh <remote-host> bin/getmail >%t")))

where bin/getmail is the following shell script:

#!/bin/sh
MAIL="/var/spool/mail/$USER"
TMP="$HOME/tmp/mailbox"
rm -f "$TMP" && movemail "$MAIL" "$TMP" >/dev/null && cat "$TMP"

This is not very robust and if something goes wrong in the middle it can
lose mail, so if there's something more built-in, I'd also love to hear
about it, but it's worked for years.  This assumes that movemail is
installed on the remote system (on Debian, it's provided by the mailutils
package).

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>