Re: troubles with mail-source on NT, pgnus 0.77

[Jack Vinson <jvinson@chevax.ecs.umass.edu>]

>>>>> "LMI" == Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

Jack Vinson <jvinson@chevax.ecs.umass.edu> writes:
[I'm having trouble with ntemacs retrieving mail with movemail, rather than
pop3-movemail.] 

LMI> The new way is more flexible.
[snip]
LMI> Does
LMI>    (call-process shell-file-name nil nil nil shell-command-switch 
LMI> 		 "echo hello")

LMI> work?  (That is, return 0?)

I CAN READ EMAIL WITH PGNUS 0.77.  Woo hoo.  :-)

This is all very curious.  I tried the above and it returned zero as Lars
predicted.  Then I tried it with movemail and it also returned zero.
However, it didn't _move_ any mail to the tofile.  (There was mail on the
server.)

So I did a little more digging and it looks like movemail is not actually
being called.  The ntemacs version of movemail is sitting in the emacs bin
directory.  For some reason, this directory is NOT in my search path and
the movemail command is not being found.  This is easy enough to fix.

There are a couple other small problems with mail-source-fetch-pop as well:
        * If I have a :program, then mail-source never asks for the
          password.  I have changed my code to test for :function instead
          as the one function that I know about (epop3mail) asks for its
          own passwords.
        * mail-source-crash-box is "~/.emacs-mail-crash-box" by default.
          Unfortunately, movemail gets confused with this and gives me the
          error "movemail: No such file or directory for ~/".  I am not
          sure of the best fix for this - the easy version is to do 
          (setq mail-source-crash-box (expand-file-name mail-source-crash-box))
          in my .gnus file.  Might there be a better place to do this to
          ensure trouble-free use for other people?

For those die hard emacsers who are running on NT boxes, I had to do the
following:
        * Make sure your PATH includes the directory in which movemail
          resides.  Or make the path explicit in the :program line of the
          nnmail-spool-file.  My settings below make the path explicit.

        * Set nnmail-spool-file and mail-source-crash-box.  Don't forget
          the "po:" before the name of the inbox.  That tells movemail to
          use the POP protocol.
      (setq nnmail-spool-file '((pop :server "server.com"
				     :user "user"
				     :program (format "%s %s" (expand-file-name "movemail.exe" exec-directory) "po:%u@%s %t %p")
				     ))
	    mail-source-crash-box (expand-file-name "~/.emacs-mail-crash-box"))

        * If you have the paths set correctly, you can just do
      (setq nnmail-spool-file '((pop :server "server.com"
				     :user "user"
				     :program "movemail po:%u@%s %t %p"
				     ))
	    mail-source-crash-box (expand-file-name "~/.emacs-mail-crash-box"))

        * To get this to work I also had to apply the progn/prog1 patch
          sent by Aaron Ucko in <kh090dqdsnz.fsf@lux.Stanford.EDU>.


-- 
Jack Vinson <jvinson@chevax.ecs.umass.edu>    http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~vinson/
Zippy: I'm DESPONDENT...  I hope there's something DEEP-FRIED under this
 miniature DOMED STADIUM...