Re: Converting to Gnus

[Neil Woods <neil@suespammers.org>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
> On Wed, 28 Jul 2004, neil@suespammers.org wrote:

[snip]
 
>> Which is better - using my current mail setup above, (ie
>> fetchmail->procmail, with possible slight modifications), or
>> converting to using the direct Gnus method(s)?
>
> Fetchmail has some advantages over Gnus for fetching mail: it's a
> daemon that always runs, it's probably a little faster, and it's built
> only for fetching mail.
>
> Gnus, on the other hand, will give you a complete solution so you
> don't have to depend on external software to fetch your mail.  I think
> the difference is mostly convenience at this point; I do plan to add
> encryption to the netrc.el code soon so you can encrypt your mail
> passwords instead of putting them plainly in the fetchmail
> configuration or ~/.authinfo file.  But this is not available right
> now.

That was most helpful. Thank you. 

>> Can I integrate spamassassin into the latter, or would ifile (and
>> ifile-gnus-el) be a better solution.
>
> You can mix them.  Pass all mail through SA first, then if it's not
> spam send it to ifile.  You can do this inside Gnus with spam.el, or
> outside Gnus with procmail.  As with fetchmail, the procmail solution
> may be slightly faster but you won't have an all-in-one setup.  In
> addition, if Gnus splits your mail there are small advantages to using
> spam.el and the registry.

Thanks. I think I will go for the all-in-one setup. I'm currently
reading through the Gnus tutorial and the manual at gnus.org.

It certainly seems to me to be the most configurable news/mail system
I've ever seen. Perhaps even a little daunting!

> For both your fetchmail and procmail setups, I recommend getting Gnus
> running without them and then gradually converting if you don't know
> Gnus well yet.  It will be a less stressful conversion.

Is there a "best" way of doing this? For example, most mail
utillities/MUA's and news-agents I've used before assume ~/Mail and
~/News as their default directories. Am I right in saying that Gnus
prefers to have sole access to its own directories?

Therefore, if I do for example:

(setq gnus-directory "~/.News/")
(setq message-directory "~/.Mail/")

how can I then incorporate my old, previously read mail (which is in
~/Mail) into my new Gnus setup?

(I have rather a lot of old news, stored in some rather large mbox
files.) 

>> I understand using the nnml backend is the recommended (and fastest)
>> method.
>
> If you plan to run something else that will access the mail outside of
> Gnus, especially for writing (e.g. an IMAP server), you should use
> nnmaildir.  It's built for concurrent access.  nnml is fast, sure, but
> nnmaildir is not significantly slower in my experience.

I would like to plan for that eventuality. Although at present I only
have POP3 mail sources, I'm planning to get an account at fastmail.fm,
from which I can use IMAP. Can I mix the two backends, dependant on
mail source?

Thanks again for your time.


Neil.