Re: please comment on my setup

[Andreas Fuchs <asf@void.at>]

Today,  <dave-mlist@bfnet.com> wrote:
> To make my gnus portable, I'm putting my .gnus file on a crypto fs on
> a portable USB drive.  

Nice idea! I'm worried about losing the drive, though. Not so much about
the data that will be in somebody else's hands, but about the mails
which will be lost. I hope you have a good backup strategy. (-:

> 1.  all incoming personal mail gets downloaded from various POP
>     servers to their respective Maildirs, which are on the portable
>     crypto drive.  When I run gnus, nnmail-split-fancy will split and
>     archive this mail on the drive.

Sounds good.

> 2.  all incoming mailing list mail stays in IMAP on server.  When I
>     run gnus, nnimap-split-fancy will split this mail on the server.
>     The purpose of this is to reduce bandwidth and time during mail
>     download.

Hm, I have thought of doing something similar (but without the cyrpto
drive). Now I use gmane.org, which does the same things, but is
generally easier to use, needs no splitting, and a "subscribe" or
"unsubscribe" is a "u" away in the group buffer.

If that's not good enough, you could use procmail splitting rules,
which are also faster than nnimap-split-fancy.

> My gnus groups buffer will show me all groups from these three
> classes.

Nice.

> My main concern is, since I'm moving from having fetchmail always
> running on a single host, downloading in the background, to gnus
> synchronously doing the downloading whenever I run "M-x gnus", am I
> going to be frustrated by the download times?  I'm especially worried
> about IMAP splitting taking a long time. Is there any way to make it
> asynchronous?

asynchronous is an interesting idea. You could run a slave gnus which
reads only the first two classes of mails in a separate emacs (or even
all three, if you use gmane (-:).

HTH,
-- 
Andreas Fuchs, <asf@acm.org>, asf@jabber.at, antifuchs