Gnus is cool

Gnus is cool

[Hrvoje Niksic]

The subject line restates a well-established fact, but with a new
reason behind it.

A few days ago a friend of mine griped about features lacking from
`mutt'.  Gnus had most of them, but one of them left me thinking: he
wanted to be able to combine privately received emails with the
archives of responses he keeps, so that he can see prolonged privare
email correspondence nicely threaded to include his contributions to
the debate.

I said: bummer, Gnus doesn't have that either.  And I've always _so_
wanted to have such functionality.  It's so hard following email
threads when my contributions are stuffed in an nnfolder archive
somewhere.

But then idea struck: I want to _combine_ this and that.  In
Gnus-speak the magic word for "combine" is "nnvirtual"!  All I need to
do is create an nnvirtual group that includes "nnml:private" and
"nnfolder:sent-mail-Nov-1999", and lo and behold: I get what I want.

I tried it and it works nicely.  M-x all-hail-gnus!

Re: Gnus is cool

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@iskon.hr> writes:
> wanted to be able to combine privately received emails with the
> archives of responses he keeps, so that he can see prolonged privare
> email correspondence nicely threaded to include his contributions to
> the debate.

> I said: bummer, Gnus doesn't have that either.  And I've always _so_
> wanted to have such functionality.  It's so hard following email
> threads when my contributions are stuffed in an nnfolder archive
> somewhere.

No reason to leave it all in some all-encompassing, generic archive.

You could always stuff your contributions right back into the same
group where they came from, with gnus-message-archive-group.

(setq gnus-message-archive-group
      '(("jprc"				"nnml:personal.jprc")
	  ; above takes followups to both personal.jprc & jprc.* newsgroups.
	("personal\\.cmu"		"nnml:personal.cmu")
	("personal\\.jrm"		"nnml:personal.jrm")
	("personal\\.karl"		"nnml:personal.karl")
	("personal\\.mark"		"nnml:personal.mark")
	("personal\\.michael"		"nnml:personal.michael")
	("personal\\."			"nnml:personal.general")
	  ; above is catch-all for remaining personal.*.
	("mailer-daemon"		"nnml:personal.general")
	("list\\."			"nnml:list.sent")
	  ; list copies come back anyway, so use generic archive.
	(".*"				"nnml:usenet")))

Re: Gnus is cool

[Hrvoje Niksic]

Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com> writes:

> You could always stuff your contributions right back into the same
> group where they came from, with gnus-message-archive-group.

Sure, but I don't do that, and neither does that friend.  That's why
nnvirtual is so cool in this case -- it allows me to adapt to existing
situation.

Re: Gnus is cool

[Brian May]

>>>>> "Karl" == Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com> writes:

    Karl> Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@iskon.hr> writes:
    Karl> No reason to leave it all in some all-encompassing, generic
    Karl> archive.

    Karl> You could always stuff your contributions right back into
    Karl> the same group where they came from, with
    Karl> gnus-message-archive-group.

Even better, if you use a MTA that supports receiving mail to
user-extension@hostname.org.au, eg postfix (by default it uses +, not -).

I have

(setq nnmail-split-fancy

[...]

("Delivered-To" "bam-\\(\\w+\\)@snoopy\\.apana\\.org\\.au" "mail.\1")

[...]
)

Now all incoming mail to bam-pgnus@snoopy.apana.org.au, would
automatically end up in the mail.pgnus folder. This means I can
easily manage a number of unrelated tasks.

In order to send mail, I would use:

     (setq gnus-posting-styles
           '(
[...]
             ("\\bpgnus\\b"
              (signature "Brian May <bam-pgnus@snoopy.apana.org.au>")
              (address "bam-pgnus@snoopy.apana.org.au")
              ("Gcc" "nnml+private:mail.pgnus")
              ("X-Home-Page" "http://snoopy.apana.org.au/~bam/")
             )
[...]
      )

What I wish I could do is something like:

     (setq gnus-posting-styles
           '(
[...]
             ("mail.\\(\\w+\\)"
              (signature "Brian May <bam-\\1@snoopy.apana.org.au>")
              (address "bam-\\1@snoopy.apana.org.au")
              ("Gcc" "nnml+private:mail.\\1")
              ("X-Home-Page" "http://snoopy.apana.org.au/~bam/")
             )
[...]
      )

...but this doesn't work. \\1 isn't expanded.

-- 
Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au>