Re: pgnus commandeers emacs to check mail

["Kai Großjohann" <Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE>]

Bill White <billw@wolfram.com> writes:

> Is there a way to make mail/news checking a completely unobtrusive
> thing? 

Hm.  Since Emacs is not multithreaded (yet), you must delegate the
process of putting mails into folders to some other program.  But
Emacs thinks it owns the ~/Mail directory (horrible things will happen
if you dare write into ~/Mail!), which makes this kinda difficult.

One way to achieve this is to use nnimap and to read mail via IMAP.  I
have configured things such that the Cyrus `deliver' programm
automatically puts mail into the right folder.  That means that, when
you hit `g', Gnus quickly scans all nnimap groups to see whether there
is new mail, and this time does not depend on the amount of new mail,
only on the number of groups.

Another way to possibly achieve it is to write into ~/Mail anyway if
you know exactly what you're doing.  I think you won't have much luck
unless you use the nnmh backend, and that is so slow compared with
nnml that this won't help you either.  And for nnfolder groups, Gnus
has the files in memory.

Btw, wouldn't it be possible to tell Gnus to have a look at the
overview files to see if the in-memory copy is still up to date before
changing anything in them?  This would kind of make it possible to use
nnml, if it weren't for race conditions.  Could some locking mechanism
be added?

kai
-- 
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