Re: Splitting, crossposts, duplicates, the universe, and everything.

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

Alexandre Oliva <oliva@dcc.unicamp.br> writes:

> On Nov 17, 1998, Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com> wrote:
> 
> > Each of these four messages will then get sent through my
> > `nnmail-split-fancy' methods, and each of them will then go to each of
> > four mailboxes ("one", "two", "three", "four").  In other words, now
> > there are 16 messages where orginally there were four.
> 
> > I know that Gnus has a `gnus-suppress-duplicates' variable that can be
> > set.  Would the use of this variable help me in this case?
> 
> Yes, unless the host that runs the mailing list software cheats on the 
> Message-Ids, which it shouldn't.

Well, I tested `gnus-suppress-duplicates', and it does indeed work,
but the manner in which is works isn't what I want.  If I send one
message to the four addresses above and then split using the methods
discussed earlier, `gnus-suppress-duplicates' causes all four of them
to end up in the same mail group (the first one of the group).

I think what I really need to do here would be something like this:

(1) Do not cause all of the email that goes to the various addresses
    to end up in the same mail spool file;  rather, allow each piece
    of email to reside in the mail spool file corresponding to the
    user to which it is sent.  For example, in the case of my sample
    `To:' line ...

      To: one@asfast.com, two@asfast.com, three@asfast.com, four@asfast.com

    ... each of the following spool files will end up with one
    copy of the message:

        /var/spool/mail/one
        /var/spool/mail/two
        /var/spool/mail/three
        /var/spool/mail/four

    [ This part is trivially easy ... all I have to do is stop 
      invoking my program which merges my mail spools together. ]

(2) Cause Gnus to somehow (???) get its `nnml' email from each
    of these four spool files, each one feeding a different
    `nnml' mailbox.  I would also want to perform a separate
    splitting procedure on each of these four spool files, to
    do the higher-granularity splitting that will be necessary.

I think I could take care of the first part of this by making use of
multiple `nnml' backends, each working with a different
`nnmail-spool-file' (is this correct?).  However, I'm not sure if I
can also define different split methods for each backend via
backend-specific values of `nnmail-split-method'.  Does anyone know if
this would work? (I'd rather ask here first before experimenting and
possibly messing up my large, existing mail spools).

Thanks again, in advance.

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com