nnmaildir nested Maildirs workaround

nnmaildir nested Maildirs workaround

[Thomas Schneider]

Hello,

I wanted to use Gnus also for reading mails.  For historical reasons, my
Maildirs are nested (e. g. ~/.maildir/work/INBOX/foo/bar/{cur,new,tmp})
and synced to various IMAP servers.  I still wanted to keep the Maildirs
local, and keep my nested structure, but nnmaildir only supports a flat
hierarchy without leading dots (as mbsync would create them).

Long story short, I now have ~/.nnmaildir with a bunch of symlinks
created by the following script.  It could be better, but for now this
does the trick.

---
#!/usr/bin/env python3

import os
import os.path
import sys

try:
    maildir = os.environ['MAILDIR']
except KeyError:
    if os.path.exists(os.path.expanduser('~/.maildir')):
        maildir = os.path.expanduser('~/.maildir')
    elif os.path.exists(os.path.expanduser('~/Maildir')):
        maildir = os.path.expanduser('~/Maildir')
    else:
        print('no maildir found', file = sys.stderr)
        sys.exit(1)

maildirs = {d for d, dirs, _ in os.walk(maildir)
            if 'cur' in dirs} # cur shall be sufficient to make a dir a maildir

nnm = os.path.expanduser('~/.nnmaildir')
if not os.path.exists(nnm):
    os.mkdir(nnm, mode = 0o700)

for d in maildirs:
    n = d[len(maildir) + 1:].replace('/', '.')
    dst = os.path.join(nnm, n)
    if os.path.exists(dst):
        continue
    src_rel = os.path.relpath(d, os.path.dirname(dst))
    os.symlink(src_rel, dst)
---

Re: nnmaildir nested Maildirs workaround

[Saša Janiška]

Thomas Schneider <qsx@chaotikum.eu> writes:

> Hello,

> I wanted to use Gnus also for reading mails.  For historical reasons, my
> Maildirs are nested (e. g. ~/.maildir/work/INBOX/foo/bar/{cur,new,tmp})
> and synced to various IMAP servers.  I still wanted to keep the Maildirs
> local, and keep my nested structure, but nnmaildir only supports a flat
> hierarchy without leading dots (as mbsync would create them).

After I decided to use org-mode as input format for my web content I
certainly wanted to settle on Gnus as my only mailer, but had kind of
doubt in its robustness since several times my sent mail was lost (sent
a post to this list about it, but it never went through) when using
nnimap back-end and that's why I wanted to move to mu4e, but then
decided to stay with Gnus by using nnmaildir while the mail was fetched
via getmail (along with bogofilter, clamav and maildrop delivery).

So far, everything looks fine, but your script does help to make Maildir
hierarchy seen by Gnus. Thank you! (I did create some symlinks manually
when starting, but to complete the setup, the script does nice job.)


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
It is far better to discharge one's prescribed duties, even though
faultily, than another's duties perfectly. Destruction in the course
of performing one's own duty is better than engaging in another's duties,
for to follow another's path is dangerous.