Re: nnfolder comments (may apply to other backends too)

[Christopher Davis <ckd@loiosh.kei.com>]

JV>  == Jan Vroonhof <vroonhof@math.ethz.ch>
LMI> == Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>

 JV> nnmail could just as well suck in a file in the procmail directory
 JV> with same name as the group. I mean there is no need for a suffix if
 JV> you keep a separate directory.

 LMI> You may keep other files in the spool directory that aren't related
 LMI> to mail thingies at all.

But it should be possible to run without the suffix if you *do* keep a
separate directory.  This has kept me from moving to Gnus for mail as yet.
The only files in the spool directory that aren't spools are hidden (dot)
files anyway, which should be ignored.

I do it this way because I have a number of tools that do things like
monitor the size and mtime/atime of files in that directory to give me a
multi-file "biff", and they use the name of the file as the title of the
mailbox.  A redundant suffix would just clutter up their output
needlessly, or force me to rewrite all of them to use it--including some
that are just shell aliases with a special set of completions.  All the
code is built so that to create a new spool file the only files that I
have to change are .procmailrc and .vm, and if I get better at lisp I'll
fix it so .vm doesn't need changing.

Code like the following, for example:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$spooldir = "$ENV{'HOME'}/Mail/spool";

chdir($spooldir) || die "can't chdir";

foreach (<*>) {
    ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,
     $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks) = stat($_);
    next if ($size == 0);
    print (($atime < $mtime)?" ** ":"    ");
    print $_,"\n";
}