Re: How to make gnus store received mail in the directory /mnt/windows?

[Rodolfo Medina <romeomedina@libero.it>]

Many thanks to all who contributed to solve
this interesting problem with their replies.
I'm giving a report that might be useful to others
in future.

Rodolfo
	
	
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To make gnus store received mail in desired directory,
let's call it /path/to/mydir, I put in my .gnus.el
the following:

(setq gnus-select-method  '(nnml "received-mail"
				 (nnml-directory "/path/to/mydir")
))


, and it worked fine unless the desired directory was:
/mnt/windows or one of its subdirs. In that case, when gnus
tried to fetch new mail it failed, and in the echo area 
such a message appeared:

Doing chmod: operation not permitted, /mnt/windows/mail-prova/mail/misc/60

. This happened because, when creating the new files where to put received mail,
gnus tries to do `chmod' in order to change the permissions of those files:
all read and write permissions are denied to other users different from
yourself: gnus is doing chmod as a security precaution, 
to ensure that your messages are not readable by anyone other than yourself.

But, the /mnt/windows partition is a vfat one, as it was shown
giving the mount command:

[rodolfo@localhost rodolfo]$ mount
/dev/hda8 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /mnt/floppy type supermount
(rw,sync,dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,
codepage=850)
/dev/hda1 on /mnt/windows type vfat 
(rw,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850)

, and vfat partitions lack of support for unix-style permissions.
So, the gnus' request of doing 'chmod' could not be satisfied
for /mnt/windows.
That is the meaning of the error message.

To solve the problem, all I had to do was to set `rodolfo'
in /etc/fstab as /mnt/windows's owner.
That way, all files and folders in /mnt/windows will be 
"simulated" owned by user rodolfo, group rodolfo (since there are no
users/groups in reality, on a FAT file system).
But actually, only the simulated owner is allowed to issue the chmod
call on a mounted FAT file system. So, now gnus could do `chmod' 
through the user rodolfo and the problem was solved.

To do so, I did:

[rodolfo@localhost rodolfo]$ id
uid=501(rodolfo) gid=501(rodolfo) groups=501(rodolfo)

, and then in /etc/fstab I changed the line

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0

into

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat
umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,uid=501,gid=501 0 0

, where (see fstab man): 

/dev/hda1 							is the first field;
/mnt/windows 							is the second field;
vfat								is the third field;
umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,uid=501,gid=501	is the fourth field;
0								is the fifth field;
0								is the sixth field.



. The only problem left is that other users different from `rodolfo'
will not be able to store their mail into /mnt/windows.