Gnus and qmail maildir format

Gnus and qmail maildir format

[Russ Allbery]

I'm looking at switching my system over to qmail, and was wondering if
Gnus supports qmail's maildir format at all.  (Rather than delivering to a
file in mbox format, it delivers to a directory and creates a seperate
file for each mail message.)

If not, any chance it could be added?  I can provide more documentation on
request.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Re: Gnus and qmail maildir format

[Jason R Mastaler]

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:

> I'm looking at switching my system over to qmail, and was wondering if
> Gnus supports qmail's maildir format at all.  (Rather than delivering to a
> file in mbox format, it delivers to a directory and creates a seperate
> file for each mail message.)

>From the ding-list archives (http://www.miranova.com/gnus-list/), it's
clear people are using qmail with Gnus sucessfully already.  I'm not
sure whether support for Maildir is built into Gnus yet, but I would
guess no based on what I've read.  Visit the archives and try
searching for "Maildir" or "qmail".  Here are some choice articles
that should help.

 http://www.miranova.com/gnus-list/Nov-1996/0381.html

 http://www.miranova.com/gnus-list/Nov-1996/0077.html

 http://www.miranova.com/gnus-list/Nov-1996/0380.html

 http://www.miranova.com/gnus-list/Nov-1996/0128.html

Justin, perhaps this topic should be added to the Gnus FAQ?

   Jason R. Mastaler                      jason@mastaler.com

Re: Gnus and qmail maildir format

[Kai Grossjohann]

>>>>> On 05 Aug 1997, Jason R Mastaler said:

  Jason> [...]  I'm not sure whether support for Maildir is built into
  Jason> Gnus yet, but I would guess no based on what I've read. [...]

If I understand correctly, the difference perceived by a user is that
qmail does not write mbox style files but instead writes one file per
message in a directory.

If nnmail-spool-file is a directory, all files in that directory are
considered to be spool files.

I'm not sure if that's what you call support for qmail.

kai
-- 
Signature?  What signature?

Re: Gnus and qmail maildir format

[Frank D. Cringle]

Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.cs.uni-dortmund.de> writes:
>
>>>>>> On 05 Aug 1997, Jason R Mastaler said:
>
>  Jason> [...]  I'm not sure whether support for Maildir is built into
>  Jason> Gnus yet, but I would guess no based on what I've read. [...]
>
>If I understand correctly, the difference perceived by a user is that
>qmail does not write mbox style files but instead writes one file per
>message in a directory.

Qmail's suggested default configuration delivers into a Mailbox (mbox)
file in the user's home directory.  You can request delivery to a
Maildir instead, but that does not seem to be much use for gnus users.
I just let qmail put new mail into ~/Mailbox and tell gnus to pick up
the mail from there:

  (setq nnmail-spool-file "/home/fdc/Mailbox")

I guess it would be more secure to avoid mbox format, by having qmail
put new stuff in ~/Maildir/ and writing a gnus function to snarf it
out of there.

I don't see much to be gained by trying to get qmail and gnus to
cooperate by using the same directory for delivery and storage.

-- 
Frank Cringle,      fdc@cliwe.ping.de
voice: (+49 2304) 467101; fax: 943357

Re: Gnus and qmail maildir format

[Russ Allbery]

Frank D Cringle <fdc@cliwe.ping.de> writes:
> Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.cs.uni-dortmund.de> writes:
>>>>>>> On 05 Aug 1997, Jason R Mastaler said:

>> Jason> [...]  I'm not sure whether support for Maildir is built into
>> Jason> Gnus yet, but I would guess no based on what I've read. [...]

>> If I understand correctly, the difference perceived by a user is that
>> qmail does not write mbox style files but instead writes one file per
>> message in a directory.

Which has the major advantage, in my opinion, that it avoids "From " lines
and therefore doesn't have to do the really broken quoting of lines
beginning with "From " in the article body.

> Qmail's suggested default configuration delivers into a Mailbox (mbox)
> file in the user's home directory.  You can request delivery to a
> Maildir instead, but that does not seem to be much use for gnus users.

Disagree strongly, particularly if you're having your mail delivered to
you over NFS.  The main reason why I'd like to have maildir support in
Gnus directly is to avoid the body quoting of lines beginning with From;
in the meantime, the following works fine:

;; Since I'm using a qmail maildir to store incoming mail, we need to call
;; maildir2mbox before trying to fetch new mail.
(add-hook 'nnmail-pre-get-new-mail-hook
          (lambda () (call-process "/var/qmail/bin/maildir2mbox" nil nil)))

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Re: Gnus and qmail maildir format

[Frank D. Cringle]

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>Frank D Cringle <fdc@cliwe.ping.de> writes:
>> Qmail's suggested default configuration delivers into a Mailbox (mbox)
>> file in the user's home directory.  You can request delivery to a
>> Maildir instead, but that does not seem to be much use for gnus users.
>
>Disagree strongly, particularly if you're having your mail delivered to
>you over NFS.  The main reason why I'd like to have maildir support in
>Gnus directly is to avoid the body quoting of lines beginning with From;

Agreed.  That would be an advantage.

>in the meantime, the following works fine:
>
>;; Since I'm using a qmail maildir to store incoming mail, we need to call
>;; maildir2mbox before trying to fetch new mail.
>(add-hook 'nnmail-pre-get-new-mail-hook
>          (lambda () (call-process "/var/qmail/bin/maildir2mbox" nil nil)))

maildir2mbox quotes From.

Your method wins if $HOME is NFS mounted.  Otherwise it's equivalent to
~/Mailbox delivery.

-- 
Frank Cringle,      fdc@cliwe.ping.de
voice: (+49 2304) 467101; fax: 943357