Re: Streamlining first-time Gnus usage

[Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>]

>>>>> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>:

> Even now, I have a heck of a time importing emails. While I was
> screwing up moving my gnus installation into a different directory I
> got a spurious Mail/misc directory with a single email in it, and
> there is apparently no command to take that email and put it into my
> gnus system.

Did you try open that single email as an nnmbox folder?  After that, you
could `B m' it to a different folder.

I've done most of my migration using `B m'.

I started out with RMAIL as (almost) the first email client I used on a
regular basis (there was a DECNet and an EARN client I had, but they
were so inconvenient to get at, they never got out of the
experimentation stage).

I quickly moved on to VM, since that let me have mbox folders that other
email tools could read.

When the MIME talk started in 1993 or thereabouts, there were no MIME
plans for VM.  But there were an least one non-emacs MH client that
supported MIME.  So I moved to having my folders as MH and using mh-e
and mew, until I finally made the decision to go all gnus (in 1995 or
1996 or thenabouts). 

Then I used nnmh and nntp until the nnmh folders were transformed into
nnml.  And then nnimap hit the stage and I used a mix of nnml and nnimap
and nntp.  And a mix of server side and client side filtering.

In 2001 I finally dropped nnml, and `B m'-d all the nnml email into
mailboxes on my private IMAP server (a cyrus server... that I had to
move into twice, because I had to patch cyrus to not strip the 8th bit
and ruin all of my just-send-8 emails from the nineties).

Since then I've run a combination of nntp and nnimap.  Sometimes two
nnimap servers, sometimes just my personal nnimap server.

When migrating servers I have talked to both servers and `B m'-d the
stuff I have cared to keep.

But I digress...