Re: problems reading IMAP mail

[David Nash <David.Nash@anu.edu.au>]

Thanks again for both follow-up responses.

I have followed Reiner's suggestion about gnus, and the loading of 
the mail into Gnus is indeed smoother now.  However, the mode line 
has "-ephemeral" appended to the name of the mail INBOX Group; and 
also when I issue a M-g (in the Gnus summary buffer) I still get an 
error "Ephemeral groups can't be reselected" -- so I don't know how 
to get new mail.

In the mean time, I have tried to follow another line of suggestions 
from a local friend, and  have taken 
http://gray.gnu.org.ua/software/emacs/rmail-1.el which is linked from 
in the middle of
http://www.gnu.org/software/mailutils/mailutils.html, prompted by the 
comment "The improved rmail.el, taking advantage of all the features 
provided by our movemail should become available with the next 
version of GNU Emacs. In the meanwhile its code is available from 
Sergey Poznyakoff's site."

I byte-compiled it and loaded it OK.  I issue "ESC-0 g" and at the 
prompt "Get new mail from file: ~/ " I point it at 
imap://<username>@<mailhost> (cf. defun rmail-parse-url at line 193)  
And I presume I'll need to install at least movemeail from the GNU 
mail utilities (not that I know how to do this...)

Matthias Buelow:
>  Hmm.. you cannot install some stuff in your home directory?
Yes, I can -- but am wary of having to instal and maintain stuff I 
don't really understand.

Anyway, if this enhancement to RMAIL can be got working I reckon it 
will be the best way out of my problem -- I can just keep using RMAIL 
as I was (and don't need to keep trying to make gnus work).

David