Converting to Gnus

Converting to Gnus

[Neil Woods]

I would like to convert my current news and mail setup to Gnus.

Currently I use fetchmail, fetching my various mail sources (POP3) via
my local exim, which then calls procmail to sort my mail into a spool
directory under ~/Mail into various incoming mbox files, which are
then in turn read and displayed by my current MUA, mutt. The
~/.procmailrc is mostly used to create mailboxes for subscribed
to mailing lists. It also has some (fairly basic) spam filtering
included.

Reading the Gnus tutorial at my.gnus.org, it suggests reading from the
various POP3 sources directly.

I've been putting off converting to Gnus for some time, since I'm
unsure how to proceed.

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)?

Can I integrate spamassassin into the latter, or would ifile (and
ifile-gnus-el) be a better solution.

I understand using the nnml backend is the recommended (and fastest)
method.

I'm running a Debian sid system, with the latest (Debian packaged)
Gnus installed.

Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Neil.

Re: Converting to Gnus

[Neil Woods]

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.

Re: Converting to Gnus

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Sun, 01 Aug 2004, neil@suespammers.org wrote:

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

I think it's fun.  Gnus is the only MUA I know that is fun to learn
and extend, not just to play with the Preferences dialog.

>> 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?

Not necessarily, but certainly you can change those defaults.

> 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 think this was answered separately.

>> 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?

I'm not sure what you mean.  You can use IMAP for real (through the
nnimap backend), or you can use it as a mail source to another
backend.  Is that what you are asking?

Ted