Re: Getting starting with gnus for mail

[Eric Schwartz <emschwar@pobox.com>]

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.