reading mail with Gnus

reading mail with Gnus

[Allan Poindexter]

I have been trying to set up Gnus as a mail reader with mixed success.
Currently I read mail with RMAIL.  I split my messages with procmail into a
variety of inboxes in "~allan/mail/.inboxes".  These correspond to BABYL files
in "~allan/mail" with the same name (e.g. the RMAIL file "~allan/mail/gnus"
has an inbox set up at "~allan/mail/.inboxes/gnus").  The one exception is
"~allan/RMAIL" whose is left in the traditional location but has an inbox at
"~allan/mail/.inboxes/inbox".  I have tried to use the nnbabyl backend to read
this but can't get it to see new mail or any other files.  Here is one of the
server definitions I tried:

(nnbabyl "mymail"
	 (nnmail-spool-file nil)
	 (nnmail-use-procmail t)
	 (nnmail-procmail-directory "~allan/mail/.inboxes")
	 (nnmail-procmail-suffix ".nnbabyl")
	 (nnbabyl-mbox-file "~allan/mail/nnbabyl/NNBABYL")
	 (nnbabyl-active-file "~allan/mail/nnbabyl/active")
	 (nnbabyl-get-new-mail t))

I set up a group like this:

("nnbabyl:mymail.misc" 3 nil nil "mymail" nil)

But no messages are found when I try to get new news.  I have tried lots of
different settings but none seems to do what I want which is to form a new
group for each of the inbox files in the .inboxes directory.  Most don't even
get the normal mail much less the other groups.  What am I doing wrong?

I am willing to change most things about mail setup to get the Gnus interface
for my mail.  One thing I would like to keep however is the procmail
processing.  I would also *like* to be able to read the resulting files in
RMAIL(i.e. babyl format) but this is not absolutely essential.  I have
considered moving to the mh backend too and will gladly listen to any
arguments why I should.  I don't know too much about the strengths and
weaknesses of each the backends I'm afraid.

Thanks in advance, dex 

P.S. To deal with one obvious objection:  I originally had
nnmail-procmail-suffix set to "".  When I changed it to ".nnbabyl" I made
copies of the appropriate inboxes at <inbox>.nnbabyl for testing purposes so
that is not the problem.

Re: reading mail with Gnus

[Jan Vroonhof]

Allan Poindexter <allan@royal-oak.csc.ti.com> writes:

Him allan this is what you had

> (nnbabyl "mymail"
> 	 (nnmail-spool-file nil)

This is (part of the doc string) for nnmail-spool-file

nnmail-spool-file's value is ...
[..]
Documentation:
Where the mail backends will look for incoming mail.
This variable is "/usr/spool/mail/$user" by default.
If this variable is nil, no mail backends will read incoming mail.

Notice the last line. So you disabled all incoming mail reading, which
is not what you want. If you have procmail style spool/inboxes only, then you
could just set this variable to 'procmail. (This is what I have and
what works, I don't read my normal mail with gnus)
i.e. in my gnus I have
 (setq nnmail-spool-file 'procmail)
 (setq nnmail-procmail-directory "~/scratch/Mail/")


However you have a special case: your main MBOX it has no
corresponding spool file, but instead you have a seperate "inbox".
You could try the following

  (setq nnmail-spool-file "~allan/mail/.inboxes/inbox")

and keeping
> 	 (nnmail-use-procmail t)

to tell gnus to ALSO read the other procmail spool files. Make sure
all the other inboxes end in .nnbabyl

> 	 (nnmail-procmail-directory "~allan/mail/.inboxes")
> 	 (nnmail-procmail-suffix ".nnbabyl")
> 	 (nnbabyl-mbox-file "~allan/mail/nnbabyl/NNBABYL")
> 	 (nnbabyl-active-file "~allan/mail/nnbabyl/active")

This looks alright. The only difficulty left is making sure that all
mail froim the spool-file, i.e. ~allan/mail/.inboxes/inbox gets into 
the nnbabyl-mbox-file, using the right nnmail-split-boxes seeting. But
I don't know to do that.

Jan