switching to nnmail-split-fancy (summary: *read* the documentation :-)

[Mark Eichin <eichin@cygnus.com>]

Just thought I'd share some mistakes I made switching from a
nnmail-split-methods list to nnmail-split-fancy. I have a *large*
split list (over 90 elements). The first step was to use

      (mapcar (lambda (x) (list 'any (car (cdr x)) (car x)))
             nnmail-split-methods))

to turn it into a list of (any "pattern" "mailbox") entries, and wrap
that in an '(| ...) group.

First mistake: (any "" "mail.misc") does *not* catch everything that
falls off the end. If the pattern matches nothing (which is *not* the
same as getting a lisp error -- that's handled, and drops things in
nnml:bogus) the mail is *not sorted* and goes nowhere. First fix is to
change that entry to a simple "mail.misc" which gets everything
without trying to match.

Second mistake: the page on Fancy Splitting *very clearly* states that
the "field contents" part of a match is matched as a *word*. It wasn't
until I was deeply single-stepped into nnmail-split-it that I noticed
the use of \\< and \\>, and went back to the docs, and saw it... Ohh,
he said *word*, he really meant *word*. (oops.) So, a bunch of rules
got ".*" added to the end (close enough for now, a few of them could
be pruned in other ways.)

After all that (and Respooling two days worth of Incoming* files after
discovering that half of my mail was falling out the bottom and not
getting filtered at all... yay for nnmail-delete-incoming defaulting
to nil :-)) and tweaking a few rules that used to match whole lines
into matching field and content seperately, I'm pretty happy with it.

Suggestion: it might be nice to add '(dest . "to\\|cc\\|apparently-to")
to nnmail-split-abbrev-alist. I happen to use it particularly to
distinguish between mail from me and mail to me, but it's also useful
for some of the netbsd lists (source-changes, in particular, comes
from owner-current-users, and would get sorted wrong using 'any.)

Ok, enough of that, thanks for listening, thanks for gnus! (It is just
amazing how much time gnus saves me, even when I don't configure it to
throw away all of my mail :-)
					_Mark_ <eichin@cygnus.com>
					Cygnus Support, Eastern USA