Re: Feature request ? (or help)

[Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>]

>>>>> Arne Elofsson writes:

>>>>> Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>
>>>>> writes:

  Kai> You then have to change your mail splitting thingy so that it
  Kai> appends messages to a file rather than writing new files into a
  Kai> directory.

  Arne> Well I do not want to do that I really like the nnml backend
  Arne> as it is compatible with mh and is very fast.

Obviously, there has been a misunderstanding here.
nnmail-use-procmail and friends are fully compatible with all
backends.  Thus, there is no reason for you to give up using the nnml
backend.

Here's how it works.  You put the following in .emacs or .gnus.el:

(setq nnmail-use-procmail t)
(setq nnmail-procmail-directory "~/spool/")
(setq nnmail-procmail-suffix "\\.in")

Now, have your mail splitting stuff write all messages for the foo.bar
group into the following file: ~/spool/foo.bar.in
When you then tell Gnus to get new news/mail, Gnus will read all the
messages in ~/spool/foo.bar.in and it will put them into the foo.bar
group.

This works fine for whatever backend you have, be it nnml (which is
what I have been using for a long time, together with the values you
see above), nnfolder, nnbabyl or anything else.

It might be, however, that the name of the spool file depends on the
values of gnus-use-long-file-name and nnmail-use-long-file-names.
Maybe the file is called ~/spool/foo/bar.in instead?

Anyone?

Also, I'm not sure if the suffix can be empty.  There was a time where
it couldn't be empty, but I'm not sure now.  Also, not that this is a
regexp.

  Kai> Also, very fancy mail splitting can be done from within Gnus so
  Kai> this is not really necessary.

  Arne> Yes I know, however some times I want to read my mail without
  Arne> starting emacs and I like to have a crontab splitting my mail
  Arne> in the background.

I see.  Well, this is not well addressed by the above.  You would have
to read the ~/spool/foo.bar.in files from without Emacs to get at the
new mail.  Would that be possible?

  Arne> I guess what I want is nnmail-use-procmail but for the nnml
  Arne> backend

See above; it is very well possible.

Maybe for what you were trying to do originally, nnmh is better
suited.  nnmh does not have the problems with corrupted active files
and the like.

kai
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