Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

[Eric Schwartz <emschwar@pobox.com>]

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.