Re: questions switching from vm to gnus to email

[David Rogoff <david@therogoffs.com>]

Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:

> David Rogoff <david@therogoffs.com> writes:
> 
> > Next, the never-ending question of backends.  I have about 15 years of
> > old email and news save in a directory tree of mbox/rfc822 format
> > files.  Should I:
> >
> > a) keep doing what I have been doing: saving mail/news in mbox format
> > and visiting the files from gnus (G D) to look at them later?
> >
> > b) convert the old stuff into nnfolder. Is there a script to convert a
> > large tree of mboxes?  If I convert all the folders, then is there a
> > way to access them as a tree from the Group buffer?  The problem I see
> > is that my 200 or so folders will appear as one huge, flat,
> > unmanagable list.
> 
> See the node "Incorporating old mail" in the manual.  The recipe there
> assumes that you have set up mail splitting rules.  

Splitting is useless for what I'm trying to do. I already have over a
thousand messages sorted into folders. I just want those folders
converted to nnfolders.
> 
> 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. 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?

> 
> > Finally (for now), I want to set some groups (my email groups) to
> > always show old messages. The Gnus Tutorial I was reading said to use
> > gnus-parameters to do this by group name. I don't see this
> > variable. Any pointers?
> 
> 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).

Also, one thing I use all the time in vm (and Agent, in Windows) is
the feature of having several mail/news folders displayed at once. It
looks like Gnus can only have one group buffer and one article buffer
at a time.  Is is really so limited?  I know switching to Gnus for
mail reading takes some attitude adjustment, but I expect it to be
able to do everything other mail readers can do, even takes a
different route to get there.

Thanks for replying,

 David