Re: Gnus5, procmail, and reading mail lists.

[Joe Hildebrand <hildjj@fuentez.com>]

> "mb" == Mark Borges <mdb@cdc.noaa.gov> writes:

   mb> I use procmail.
   mb> Procmail splits my incoming mail box into the mailing list
   mb> boxes in my home directory, i.e., it takes /var/mail/me and
   mb> extracts mail from the two lists foo and bar into:

   mb> 	$HOME/mail/spool/foo 
   mb> 	$HOME/mail/spool/bar

you will have less difficulty if you use:

$HOME/mail/spool/foo.spool
$HOME/mail/spool/bar.spool

   mb> Currently, I use VM and movemail to read these, but the scoring
   mb> capability of Gnus5 is begging me to try it instead.

   mb> So, how do Gnus / procmail exist, esp. with regard to
   mb> lockfiles?

fine.  gnus uses movemail, which does locking.  I have this at the top
of my .procmailrc, though:

# use lockfiles that Emacs movemail honours... otherwise you may lose mail
LOCKEXT=+

   mb> My reading of the info pages suggests I do the following:

   mb> 	(setq nnmail-use-procmail t); use it 
   mb> 	(setq nnmail-spool-file "procmail") ; or should that be a
   mb>     variable? 

try (setq nnmail-spool-file 'procmail)

   mb> 	(setq nnmail-split-methods nil)) ; avoid unpleasant side effects
   mb>  (setq nnmail-procmail-directory (expand-file-name ~/mail/spool)) 
   mb>  (setq nnmail-procmail-suffix nil) ; just use the
   mb>     group name? I want the group to be foo and the spool file
   mb>     to be foo, as above.

don't do this last one.  there used to be a bug with that; I don't
know if it has been fixed, yet.  just use ".spool", the default.

   mb> Also, there was some discussion of why this:

   mb> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   mb> If you use `procmail' to split things directory into an nnmh
   mb> directory (which you shouldn't do), you should set
   mb> `nnmail-keep-last-article' to non-`nil' to prevent Gnus from
   mb> ever expiring the final article in a mail newsgroup. This is
   mb> quite, quite
   mb> important. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   mb> 

   mb> was important, but I lost it. Anyway, I'm planning on using
   mb> nnml as the backend to get the NOV databases (unless procmail
   mb> can do it more efficiently). Is it just as important for nnml
   mb> as nnmh?

this was the old way.  don't worry about it.  Gnus takes care of
everything, the way you are doing it.

   mb> Finally, should I restrict myself to the Gnus5 expiry process,
   mb> or can I just run a simple cron job each weekend to remove old
   mb> mail? (I suspect that might confuse Gnus5 after a while,
   mb> though.)

use expiry.  unless your script is going to modify your .overview
file, and you are *sure* that you are never going to be using Gnus at
the time of day that your cron job fires.

-- 
Joe Hildebrand                  Fuentez Systems Concepts
hildjj@fuentez.com              11781 Lee-Jackson Hwy, Suite 700
Lead Software Engineer          Fairfax, VA 22033
	"Breakfast recapitulates phylogeny" - Spider Robinson