Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

[Reiner Steib]

On Tue, Aug 12 2003, Eric Schwartz wrote:

> I'd like to play a bit with gnus for email; I think I'll like it, but
> I'm having the devil's own time getting started.  I'm using the
> default setup from the info file, only with nnmbox instead of nnml,
> since I have quite a bit of mail archived in mbox format already.  

I would not recommend to use nnmbox; I'd prefer nnfolder, nnml or
nnmaildir, see (info "(gnus)Comparing Mail Back Ends").  You can copy
or respool (after setting up split methods) messages from an mbox file
to other back ends.

> My mail setup looks like this:
>
> (add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnmbox "")))

Try...

  (add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods '(nnmbox ""))

... (adding another method) or (removing previous entries) ...

  (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnmbox ""))).

> For instance, the documentation on backends talks about how you use
> them to get mail, when it seems to me as if the mail-sources
> variable controls how you get mail, and the backends just control
> how it's stored on disk.  Does this make sense, or am I just
> woefully confused?

Makes sense.  Which part of the manual confuses you?

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

Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

[Eric Schwartz]

Reiner Steib <4.uce.03.r.s@nurfuerspam.de> writes:
> I would not recommend to use nnmbox; I'd prefer nnfolder, nnml or
> nnmaildir, see (info "(gnus)Comparing Mail Back Ends").  You can copy
> or respool (after setting up split methods) messages from an mbox file
> to other back ends.

Except that I might decide I don't like gnus-for-mail next week, and
if I use nnml or some such, then I have to manually move all my
archives back into mbox format so I can use something else which does
like mbox format.

I'm a little curious as to the difference between nnmbox and nnfolder,
though: nnfolder looks like the way I'm doing things now, with a main
"inbox", and a bunch of mbox files for each mailing list I follow.
But nnmbox looks like that too, if you set up mail splitting
properly.  Or does mail splitting in nnmbox just create some index
file that maps message <n> in the global mbox to group <foo>?

>   (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnmbox ""))).

Thanks, this did the trick.

>> For instance, the documentation on backends talks about how you use
>> them to get mail, when it seems to me as if the mail-sources
>> variable controls how you get mail, and the backends just control
>> how it's stored on disk.  Does this make sense, or am I just
>> woefully confused?
>
> Makes sense.  Which part of the manual confuses you?

This part:

  First, just for terminology, the "back end" is the common word for a
  low-level access method--a transport, if you will, by which something
  is acquired.

That says, to me, that a back end is meant to acquire email somehow,
to transport it from somewhere to somewhere else.  If my understanding
is correct, the back end doesn't transport anything anywhere; it's the
storage format for the mail fetched by whatever function looks at
mail-sources.  Continuing:

  The sense is that one's mail has to come from somewhere,
  and so selection of a suitable back end is required in order to get
  that mail within spitting distance of Gnus.

Again, it talks about back ends as if they had something to do with
getting mail off a remote POP or IMAP server which doesn't match my
understanding of what they are used for.

If I were writing that section, based on my admittedly limited
understanding, I'd write something like this:

  Most email programs have one or two choices of how your mail is
  stored on disk.  Gnus lets you choose from several different
  physical formats for storing email, called "back ends".  Which back
  end you choose will most likely depend on if you need to access your
  email through other programs besides Gnus.

  If you don't have a preference, or aren't sure what that paragraph
  means, nnml is a good default.

I'm not suggesting that necessarily as a patch; I'm just trying to
show a way of explaining back ends that focuses on how a user of gnus
would likely (IMO, natch) want to understand them.

-=Eric
-- 
Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million
typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare.
		-- Blair Houghton.

Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

[Eric Schwartz]

Reiner Steib <4.uce.03.r.s@nurfuerspam.de> writes:
> I would not recommend to use nnmbox; I'd prefer nnfolder, nnml or
> nnmaildir, see (info "(gnus)Comparing Mail Back Ends").  You can copy
> or respool (after setting up split methods) messages from an mbox file
> to other back ends.

Except that I might decide I don't like gnus-for-mail next week, and
if I use nnml or some such, then I have to manually move all my
archives back into mbox format so I can use something else which does
like mbox format.

I'm a little curious as to the difference between nnmbox and nnfolder,
though: nnfolder looks like the way I'm doing things now, with a main
"inbox", and a bunch of mbox files for each mailing list I follow.
But nnmbox looks like that too, if you set up mail splitting
properly.  Or does mail splitting in nnmbox just create some index
file that maps message <n> in the global mbox to group <foo>?

>   (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnmbox ""))).

Thanks, this did the trick.

>> For instance, the documentation on backends talks about how you use
>> them to get mail, when it seems to me as if the mail-sources
>> variable controls how you get mail, and the backends just control
>> how it's stored on disk.  Does this make sense, or am I just
>> woefully confused?
>
> Makes sense.  Which part of the manual confuses you?

This part:

  First, just for terminology, the "back end" is the common word for a
  low-level access method--a transport, if you will, by which something
  is acquired.

That says, to me, that a back end is meant to acquire email somehow,
to transport it from somewhere to somewhere else.  If my understanding
is correct, the back end doesn't transport anything anywhere; it's the
storage format for the mail fetched by whatever function looks at
mail-sources.  Continuing:

  The sense is that one's mail has to come from somewhere,
  and so selection of a suitable back end is required in order to get
  that mail within spitting distance of Gnus.

Again, it talks about back ends as if they had something to do with
getting mail off a remote POP or IMAP server which doesn't match my
understanding of what they are used for.

If I were writing that section, based on my admittedly limited
understanding, I'd write something like this:

  Most email programs have one or two choices of how your mail is
  stored on disk.  Gnus lets you choose from several different
  physical formats for storing email, called "back ends".  Which back
  end you choose will most likely depend on if you need to access your
  email through other programs besides Gnus.

  If you don't have a preference, or aren't sure what that paragraph
  means, nnml is a good default.

I'm not suggesting that necessarily as a patch; I'm just trying to
show a way of explaining back ends that focuses on how a user of gnus
would likely (IMO, natch) want to understand them.

-=Eric
-- 
Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million
typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare.
		-- Blair Houghton.

Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

[Eric Schwartz]

> I would not recommend to use nnmbox; I'd prefer nnfolder, nnml or
> nnmaildir, see (info "(gnus)Comparing Mail Back Ends").  You can copy
> or respool (after setting up split methods) messages from an mbox file
> to other back ends.

Except that I might decide I don't like gnus-for-mail next week, and
if I use nnml or some such, then I have to manually move all my
archives back into mbox format so I can use something else which does
like mbox format.

I'm a little curious as to the difference between nnmbox and nnfolder,
though: nnfolder looks like the way I'm doing things now, with a main
"inbox", and a bunch of mbox files for each mailing list I follow.
But nnmbox looks like that too, if you set up mail splitting
properly.  Or does mail splitting in nnmbox just create some index
file that maps message <n> in the global mbox to group <foo>?

>   (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnmbox ""))).

Thanks, this did the trick.

>> For instance, the documentation on backends talks about how you use
>> them to get mail, when it seems to me as if the mail-sources
>> variable controls how you get mail, and the backends just control
>> how it's stored on disk.  Does this make sense, or am I just
>> woefully confused?
>
> Makes sense.  Which part of the manual confuses you?

This part:

  First, just for terminology, the "back end" is the common word for a
  low-level access method--a transport, if you will, by which something
  is acquired.

That says, to me, that a back end is meant to acquire email somehow,
to transport it from somewhere to somewhere else.  If my understanding
is correct, the back end doesn't transport anything anywhere; it's the
storage format for the mail fetched by whatever function looks at
mail-sources.  Continuing:

  The sense is that one's mail has to come from somewhere,
  and so selection of a suitable back end is required in order to get
  that mail within spitting distance of Gnus.

Again, it talks about back ends as if they had something to do with
getting mail off a remote POP or IMAP server which doesn't match my
understanding of what they are used for.

If I were writing that section, based on my admittedly limited
understanding, I'd write something like this:

  Most email programs have one or two choices of how your mail is
  stored on disk.  Gnus lets you choose from several different
  physical formats for storing email, called "back ends".  Which back
  end you choose will most likely depend on if you need to access your
  email through other programs besides Gnus.

  If you don't have a preference, or aren't sure what that paragraph
  means, nnml is a good default.

I'm not suggesting that necessarily as a patch; I'm just trying to
show a way of explaining back ends that focuses on how a user of gnus
would likely (IMO, natch) want to understand them.

-=Eric
-- 
Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million
typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare.
		-- Blair Houghton.

Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

[Eric Schwartz]

Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com> writes:
> If you have MH lying around, you can put those nnml folders back into
> an mbox with packf.

Yeah, I know, but I'm a fundamentally lazy bastard, and want to be
mucking with my mail as little as possible.  Fortunately for me, it
appears that nnfolder is ideal for my working style.  Still, I'd like
to know what the difference between mbox and nnfolder is when using
mail splitting.

-=Eric
-- 
Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million
typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare.
		-- Blair Houghton.

Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

[Kai Großjohann]

Joe Davison <halting@attbi.com> writes:

> I don't suppose there's a "nnvm" -- that basically lets me use VM style
> mail boxes with a gnus user interface?

Well, nnfolder uses one file per group.  That is also what VM does,
if I'm not mistaken.

However, it is best not to use other tools except Gnus to write its
files.  (It's okay to read them.)  Gnus gets very angry if it notices
that you have changed files behind its back.

So if you plan on switching mail readers regularly, this is not a
good way.  For this, I suggest to set up an IMAP server and to use
Gnus as an IMAP client.

But if you only want to switch every couple of months, then maybe it's
enough to just copy the files from the Gnus directory to the VM
directory before switching to VM, and to use `G f' from Gnus (then
copy messages from the VM files to the Gnus groups) when switching
back.
-- 
Two cafe au lait please, but without milk.

Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

[Simon Josefsson]

Reiner Steib <4.uce.03.r.s@nurfuerspam.de> writes:

> On Mon, Aug 18 2003, Kai Großjohann wrote:
>
>> Joe Davison <halting@attbi.com> writes:
>>
>>> I don't suppose there's a "nnvm" -- that basically lets me use VM style
>>> mail boxes with a gnus user interface?
>
> In <news:iluwudtyw89.fsf@latte.josefsson.org>, Simon Josefsson posted
> a patch that (AFAICS) allows to read VM folders as nndoc groups.

Apparently there was some >From escaping problem related to it.
Perhaps I find time to debug it soon...

Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

[Eric Schwartz]

Joe Davison <halting@attbi.com> writes:
> Perhaps you want another topic -- one for only the case where you don't
> want the mail fetched from elsewhere, ever.   But really, the confusion
> may just be in how you're thinking about it.  

No, I understand (at least, I think I do) how gnus is thinking about
it; my point is that the documentation is written from the point of
view of someone who might want to write a back end, not someone trying
to pick one.

> Try this:  the mail is stored somewhere -- it might be on your machine,
> it might be on some other machine.  In any case, to read it, the program
> needs to get it.  That's the job of the back end -- it transfers the
> mail from whereever it is, in some mail format, and puts it where it
> needs to be, in news format.   Which backend you want to use depends on
> what kind of mail format it's in, and the protocol for retrieving it. 

Except that all the backends listed in the info documentation use
local storage.  So there's still no transporting being done-- unless
you count the metaphorical transport between one format and another,
which feels shaky to me.  

What is the difference to the end-user, really, between backends?  I
believe that's the question the user's trying to answer when they read
the "Choosing a Mail Back End" section, and I think the paragraph I
quoted hinders, rather than aids, in answering that question. Myself,
I'd say that difference is in the on-disk storage format.  That
difference in turn has various performance implications and so on, but
really the difference between nnml and nnfolder and nnmbox lies 99% in
their on-disk storage.

And if that's the case, then I think explaining *that* is more
important than alluding to the concept of a transport mechanism that
doesn't really exist in this case.  I'm a fairly savvy Unix geek who's
used elm, then mutt, then evolution before turning to gnus (which I'm
really liking more and more as I get into it), and it took me several
re-reads before I could even guess correctly what that paragraph
meant.

I'm not suggesting that the concept be removed from the docs, but I
think it's more appropriate in a section entitled, "Coding a Mail Back
End" than one entitled, "Choosing a Mail Back End". 

> That much I (think I) understand.  I've not yet done enough reading /
> experimenting to pick a backend myself.  I'm in much the same place you
> are -- I use Apple's mail.app on OS X (10.2.6) which uses mbox format.
> I don't want to screw up that file, because my wife also reads the mail,
> but she only uses mail.app.  

Can you do that without manually importing mail from each of your
folders each time?


-=Eric
-- 
Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million
typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare.
		-- Blair Houghton.

Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

[Joe Davison]

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Eric Schwartz wrote:
>  Joe Davison <halting@attbi.com> writes:
>  
> > That much I (think I) understand.  I've not yet done enough reading
> > / experimenting to pick a backend myself.  I'm in much the same
> > place you are -- I use Apple's mail.app on OS X (10.2.6) which uses
> > mbox format.  I don't want to screw up that file, because my wife
> > also reads the mail, but she only uses mail.app.
>  
>  Can you do that without manually importing mail from each of your
>  folders each time?
>  

I don't know.  That's what I need to figure out.

When I worked (I'm now "retired") I used (X)emacs/VM along with Sun's
MailTool.  VM moved the mail from /var/mail to a local file, but I could
set up Mailtool to use the same file, so I could easily switch between
the two tools as needed.  That was great.  I also used Gnus to read
newsgroups.  I kept reading about the ability to use Gnus for both, and
having a single interface seemed appealing.  Now I need to figure out if
it can really be done.

I'm beginning to suspect I'd be better off forgetting Gnus for mail, and
going with VM, if I want to share the mail folders with other tools,
since, as I understand it, the basic file structure of news and mail
differs so much.

joe