Re: questions switching from vm to gnus to email

[Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com>]

David Rogoff <david@therogoffs.com> writes:

> Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:
>
>> If you haven't done that (as it appears from your .gnus), then instead
>> of respooling in step 5 (`B r'), you can copy (`B c') your old mail to a
>> new destination.
>
> This is insane: it would take hours to do this for all the folders I
> have. 

I'm not sure I understand.  Do your mbox files contain an enormous
amount of messages?  On my rather slow machine Gnus can copy around 2000
messages per minute.

If that's the problem, you can just leave them as mbox files.  Just
subscribe to them with `G f'.

> Why can't Gnus import a whole directory tree? Even Outlook Express and
> Netscape can do this.  Are you telling me that in infinately powerful
> emacs/gnus I have to do this manually?

There's no predefined functionality for this, AFAIK.  If you want to
automate it a bit, you could do something like this:

(dolist group '("/path/to/mbox-file1" "/path/to/mbox-file2" ...)
	(gnus-group-make-doc-group group 'mbox))

>> Do `G c' (gnus-group-customize) or `G p'
>> (gnus-group-edit-group-parameters) on the group from the group buffer.
>
> This is still folder by folder.  What I'm trying to do is set
> parameters for groups of folders (e.g. all mail folders).

Use topics-mode and topic paramters.  Groups under a topic inherit
properties from their parent topic.

Topics, subtopics etc. is also the answer to your question about how to
arrange groups in a non-flat structure.

(BTW, `gnus-paramters', which you asked about, does exist in the
development version, but it's not present in Gnus 5.8).