Me and my nnextern..

Me and my nnextern..

[Andy Eskilsson]

Guess this is my last call for this.. 

Well basically I have a program that fetches mail from you hotmail
account, and currently puts it into a normail mail folder (it is
easily modified for other output).

I want Gnus to take care of splitting and expiration of mails that
comes in through this place..

I am reading mail through pop, it never lands on /var/spool/mail, so I
could put it there and enable nnmail again..

Well now comes the funny part, I would like to POST through hotmail
too, it is just a hack or two away ;-)

Am I the only one who see a use of a nnextern backend?? So it is easy
(for us non-lispers) to hack an interface to for example supernews
mail, supernews (WREN) web reading news, sexzilla.com's webnews(yeah I
know, I only read it for alt.sex.furniture^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H), some
basic webboards! (Now that would be a hit, nnwebboard backend!)

nnextern should probably be able to manage both mail-way, taking care
of the article management by itself, and letting the other program
take care of the articles.. (can two backends put articles into the
same folders?)

	/andy

Re: Me and my nnextern..

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Andy Eskilsson <andy.eskilsson@telelogic.se> writes:

> Well basically I have a program that fetches mail from you hotmail
> account, and currently puts it into a normail mail folder (it is
> easily modified for other output).

You could just set `nnmail-spool-file' to wherever you stored the mail
and let your mail backend slurp it in.

> Well now comes the funny part, I would like to POST through hotmail
> too, it is just a hack or two away ;-)
> 
> Am I the only one who see a use of a nnextern backend?? So it is easy
> (for us non-lispers) to hack an interface to for example supernews
> mail, supernews (WREN) web reading news, sexzilla.com's webnews(yeah I
> know, I only read it for alt.sex.furniture^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H), some
> basic webboards! (Now that would be a hit, nnwebboard backend!)

It's not clear to me what you want, really.

We already have backends that communicate with external programs.
nnweb, nntp and (soon) nnimap, to name a few.  (I've just written
nnlistserv which reads Majordomo (etc.) web archives.)  All these use
vastly different external interfaces, but deliver the same data to
Gnus.

What you seem to want is a backend that will allow you to write simple
external programs that feed data to Gnus.  My suggestion would simply
be to write nntp-like interfaces, and just use nntp.el.  If you feel
that this is a too heavy protocol (it isn't, really; you just don't
implement the "tricky" functions.  GROUP, HEAD and ARTICLE is all that
is required), then I would be open to adding a new, generic nnextern
backend that talks the protocol you would like it to talk.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: Me and my nnextern..

[Andy Eskilsson]

/ Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
| 
| What you seem to want is a backend that will allow you to write simple
| external programs that feed data to Gnus.  My suggestion would simply
| be to write nntp-like interfaces, and just use nntp.el.  If you feel
[...]

One of the reasons for me not going through the nntp-backend is that I
want gnus to manage the articles, not querying them from a 'server'.. 

Ahh well the solution so far is that I put them into a nnmh-folder
that is read by Gnus.

The support for reading Majordomo webarchives sounds great.. Now I
only miss functionality to read web-boards, hmm this could be done
through a nntp-talking program.. 

	/andy

p.s. Internet Explorer 4.0 for Solaris 5.5.1 (ARRGH)

Re: Me and my nnextern..

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Andy Eskilsson <andy.eskilsson@telelogic.se> writes:

> The support for reading Majordomo webarchives sounds great.. Now I
> only miss functionality to read web-boards, hmm this could be done
> through a nntp-talking program.. 

It can probably be done directly from nnlistserv, which is a child of
nnweb.  For each new site one has to define the following:

1) How to find an "overview" of which articles are available.  This is
usually an URL, or a set of URLS.

2) Write a function to glean the info from this overview.

3) Write a function to wash each article.

4) There is no number 4.

My guess is that number 2 and 3 will be general functions for each
type of web archive -- LISTSERV, Majordomo, etc.  Unless people like
fiddling heavily with these things.

The same goes for "web chats", or whatever they call those
monstrosities. 

Uhm...  I guess there should be a function for how to submit new
articles to these things as well.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@ifi.uio.no * Lars Ingebrigtsen

Re: Me and my nnextern..

[Greg Stark]

So what you want is not a new Gnus backend, but rather a new method for
sending mail and receiving mail. 

The former is abstracted somewhat already, at my request though i have yet to
actually get around to writing proper posting support for my backend. Look at
message-send-method-alist.

The latter is the subject of discussion on this list already. We need some way
to specify a list of sources of mail which are separated from gnus somewhat.
Already we have pop3.el, movemail, procmail spools, and native mail spool
access. He needs a way to download his hotmail mail as well. 

Personally i'm a fan of fetchmail, it supports more protocols than Gnus is
likely ever to and doesn't tie up my emacs (oh yeah, it's about that time
again for me to start advocating for an asynchronous backend interface). So I
don't have much of a personal stake in this line of development. But it does
seem to be something that needs to be done. 

greg