mail-splitting issue

mail-splitting issue

[Lars Tobias Borsting]

I recently set up mail-splitting for my mail. Before this, all mail
ended up in the mail.misc folder in my home directory. After setting up
mail-splitting I got all mail in it's rightful folder, but I stopped
getting mail in mail.misc. As I knew this was not right, I sent some
test mails to my inbox that I knew wouldn't be caught by any of the
filters, and it didn't make it to my gnus mail.

The reason is that mail-splitting disregards any mail that doesn't
trigger any of the filters. This is why it is necessary to have a
("mail.misc" "^To.*") filter as well. This rule has caused me to
actually loose quite a few mails that I would normally get in
mail.misc. And it has just vanished.

I guess what I'm trying to say, is that I think perhaps it shouldn't just go to
/dev/null by default, but end up in some kind of trash folder. For a
newbie gnus'er this is quite a catastrophy, if he doesn't know about
this.

Any thaughts on the subject?

Regards,
Lars Tobias Borsting
gnus newbie

Re: mail-splitting issue

[Jochen Küpper]

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On Mon, 12 Apr 2004 14:54:38 GMT Al Arduengo wrote:

Al> Lars Tobias Borsting <larstobi-wYgTyex4ORZRyvKAgBWctw@public.gmane.org> writes:

>> I recently set up mail-splitting for my mail. Before this, all mail
>> ended up in the mail.misc folder in my home directory. After setting up
>> mail-splitting I got all mail in it's rightful folder, but I stopped
>> getting mail in mail.misc. As I knew this was not right, I sent some
>> test mails to my inbox that I knew wouldn't be caught by any of the
>> filters, and it didn't make it to my gnus mail.

Sorry you lost (potentially important) mail.

How did you learn about mail-splitting and the corresponding
variable(s)?

Al> A thought I have is that you don't have a default split at the end
Al> of the list.

I think that is exactly what Lars Tobias said as well (in his own words).


Well, Lars Tobias, in the Gnus manual there is a section on Splitting
Mail where it tells you exactly about the issue and what to do,
excerpt given below. What do you think is unclear about that and how
would you suggest to improve it?

,----[ (info "(gnus)Splitting Mail") ]
|    The last of these groups should always be a general one, and the
| regular expression should _always_ be `*' so that it matches any mails
| that haven't been matched by any of the other regexps.  (These rules are
| processed from the beginning of the alist toward the end.  The first
| rule to make a match will "win", unless you have crossposting enabled.
| In that case, all matching rules will "win".)
`----

Greetings,
Jochen
-- 
Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit                http://www.Jochen-Kuepper.de
    Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité                GnuPG key: CC1B0B4D
        (Part 3 you find in my messages before fall 2003.)

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Re: mail-splitting issue

[Al Arduengo]

Jochen Küpper <usenet@jochen-kuepper.de> writes:

> On Mon, 12 Apr 2004 14:54:38 GMT Al Arduengo wrote:
>
> Al> Lars Tobias Borsting <larstobi@itea.ntnu.no> writes:
>
>>> I recently set up mail-splitting for my mail. Before this, all mail
>>> ended up in the mail.misc folder in my home directory. After setting up
>>> mail-splitting I got all mail in it's rightful folder, but I stopped
>>> getting mail in mail.misc. As I knew this was not right, I sent some
>>> test mails to my inbox that I knew wouldn't be caught by any of the
>>> filters, and it didn't make it to my gnus mail.
>
> Sorry you lost (potentially important) mail.
>
> How did you learn about mail-splitting and the corresponding
> variable(s)?
>
> Al> A thought I have is that you don't have a default split at the end
> Al> of the list.
>
> I think that is exactly what Lars Tobias said as well (in his own words).
>

Actually he did not say this at all.  Please refer to the paragraph
you quoted above.  My hunch (wrong or right) is that he forgot to add
a default split rule at the tail of the list.

>
> Well, Lars Tobias, in the Gnus manual there is a section on Splitting
> Mail where it tells you exactly about the issue and what to do,
> excerpt given below. What do you think is unclear about that and how
> would you suggest to improve it?
>
> ,----[ (info "(gnus)Splitting Mail") ]
> |    The last of these groups should always be a general one, and the
> | regular expression should _always_ be `*' so that it matches any mails
> | that haven't been matched by any of the other regexps.  (These rules are
> | processed from the beginning of the alist toward the end.  The first
> | rule to make a match will "win", unless you have crossposting enabled.
> | In that case, all matching rules will "win".)
> `----
>
> Greetings,
> Jochen
> -- 
> Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit                http://www.Jochen-Kuepper.de
>     Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité                GnuPG key: CC1B0B4D
>         (Part 3 you find in my messages before fall 2003.)

-- 
remove NUNYA to email me
~/.signature

Re: mail-splitting issue

[Reiner Steib]

On Mon, Apr 12 2004, Lars Tobias Borsting wrote:

> About improving the manual; perhaps make the text about the general rule
> stand out more, so that everyone must see it, even those who just skim the
> text for some quick documentation. Like me... ;-) An especially point
> out that if the general rule isn't present, the mail will vanish. Maybe
> I should give Lars Magne a hint about this.

According to your headers, you are using a very old version of Gnus
(5.6.45).  I'd suggest to upgrade to Gnus 5.10.6.  And I think that
the manual in 5.10.6 is quite clear about this, WDYT?

,----[ (info "(gnus)Splitting Mail") ]
| 6.3.3 Splitting Mail
| 
| The `nnmail-split-methods' variable says how the incoming mail is to be
| split into groups.
| 
|      (setq nnmail-split-methods
|        '(("mail.junk" "^From:.*Lars Ingebrigtsen")
|          ("mail.crazy" "^Subject:.*die\\|^Organization:.*flabby")
|          ("mail.other" "")))
| 
|    This variable is a list of lists, where the first element of each of
| these lists is the name of the mail group (they do not have to be called
| something beginning with `mail', by the way), and the second element is
| a regular expression used on the header of each mail to determine if it
| belongs in this mail group.  The first string may contain `\\1' forms,
| like the ones used by `replace-match' to insert sub-expressions from
| the matched text.  For instance:
| 
|      ("list.\\1" "From:.* \\(.*\\)-list@majordomo.com")
| 
|    The second element can also be a function.  In that case, it will be
| called narrowed to the headers with the first element of the rule as the
| argument.  It should return a non-`nil' value if it thinks that the
| mail belongs in that group.
| 
|    The last of these groups should always be a general one, and the
| regular expression should _always_ be `*' so that it matches any mails
| that haven't been matched by any of the other regexps.  (These rules are
| processed from the beginning of the alist toward the end.  The first
| rule to make a match will "win", unless you have crossposting enabled.
| In that case, all matching rules will "win".)
`----

> Another approach is that the mail-spliting function could be modified
> check if there is such a general rule and if not, ask whether general
> mail should go up in to thin air.

This has already be done in Gnus 5.10.6, AFAICS:

,----
| 2003-10-17  Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen  <larsi@gnus.org>
| [...]
| 	* nnmail.el (nnmail-article-group): Default to "bogus".
`----

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/