Re: deleting email, expiring, mail-source-delete-incoming

[lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de>]

Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> writes:

> On Sun, Jun 12 2011, lee wrote:
>
>> Well, I now have:
>>
>> ,----
>> | (setq
>> |  gnus-select-method '(nnml "")
>> |  mail-sources '((maildir :path "~/Maildir/")))
>> `----
>>
>> The mail-source-delete-incoming-mail variable isn´t changed anymore in
>> ~/.gnus.el. My MTA delivers all mail (with one exception for nndiary
>> mails) to ~/Maildir, in maildir format. From there, gnus fetches it.
>
> Maybe it would make more sense to use the nnmaildir back end?  I.e. no
> entry in `mail-source´ and an nnmaildir method in `gnus-select-method´
> (or `gnus-secondary-select-methods').  See (info "(gnus)Maildir").

Well, yes, it might have if I had known better when starting to switch
from mutt to gnus. Alas, I made the whole thing rather complicated
because first I found out that gnus cannot access my email stored in
maildir format under ~/Mail. Later, during moving my email, I found out
that there were two reasons for that: The tmp folder in ~/Mail/Maildir
(which was the incoming folder) was a maildir itself, and the directory
hierachy in which I stored my mail was a mixup of mailfolders and
folders, which is something that doesn´t fit into what gnus expects.

Then I thought I would use IMAP for all my mail and thus have the same
method of accessing my email with whatever client I might use, plus the
advantage of potentially being able to access it from anywhere. IMAP
turned out to be rather troublesome for two reasons: The version of
courier-imap currently in Debian testing has a bug that makes it
impossible to access some of the folders with gnus. I tried to compile
courier-imap from svn myself because this bug apparently has already
been fixed in more recent versions, and I found out that it doesn´t
compile (without a lot of effort). There doesn´t seem to be any other
IMAP server supporting maildir ...

Anyway, I had moved part of my emails to IMAP aready when it became too
annoying that some folders were inaccessible, so I finallly decided to
use nnml. Since nnml appears to be the native format of gnus, it´s
probably going to work best with that. Should I seriously need to access
all my email remotely, I can use ssh. For the cell phone, I can use IMAP
to see what mail has newly arrived, and that´s enough. The IMAP client
in the phone doesn´t even support folders, anyway.

>> So that would mean all the mail gnus has fetched from ~/Maildir stays
>> in ~/Maildir for another 10 days before it´s being deleted?
>
> The files corresponding to `mail-source-delete-incoming´ are stored in
> `mail-source-directory´ and are called "Incoming*"

Could I delete those manually? I currently have 89140 of those, while a
gnus-slave is moving mails from mailing lists into the appropriate
groups since three days or so. I made the mistake to dump those (with
mutt) into the incoming directory to get them into gnus. Unfortunately,
gnus is awfully slow with processing them.

In the meantime, I´ve switched the MTA to deliver to another directory
temporarily so that I can see what´s coming in with a gnus using the
temporary directory as its mail-source until the slave is done. Once the
slave is done, I could either switch back and hope that the Incoming*
files will be removed after 10 days, or I can delete them manually
before switching back, unless that would confuse gnus (which is somewhat
messed up now because I tried to configure it the way I wanted, see my
other post).

>> And the temp files? Is all the mail actually quadrupled until the files
>> in incoming (~/Maildir) and the temporary files are expired?
>
> Not sure what you are counting.  The usual chain is:
>
> $MAIL (/var/mail/USER) -> Incoming* -> ~/Mail/some.group/123
>
> Incoming* is the only place where a redundant copy of a message lives.

Well, I´ve been using maildir (and mutt) for about 15 years now, so
/var/spool/mail/user or the like isn´t exactly usual for me. It just
seems way too dangerous to keep all the mail in one huge file, or in a
few huge files.

So in this context, "temp files" makes me think of what might appear in
the "tmp" directory of a maildir folder.