Re: what mail source nnml correspond?

[David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu>]

xFire <all_is_free@hotmail.com> writes:

> i mean how to read the nnml dirctory with other mail back end?

The one disadvantage of nnml is that Gnus is the only program that
uses it.  It's very similar to other file-per-message backends, like
maildir and MH, though, and you can look at the nnml directory and
read the messages directly outside of Emacs (heresy!).  The big
difference is a file called .overview that contains the information
needed for the summary buffer; this means that nnml is "fast" because
it only needs to read the .overview file and not dig through
individual messages.

I do sometimes dig through the files directly if I need something
quickly and starting Emacs is too much of a pain (heresy!).  grepping
the .overview file will give me a message number, and then I can cat
that file directly.

Since you mentioned "mail source" in the message line, it's also worth
mentioning that if you're using nnml you're probably pulling mail off
of your mail server, and it's gone from there.  If you have an IMAP
mail source you can configure it to not delete messages (see
:fetchflag in info://gnus/Mail+Source+Specifiers).  For POP3 it's
harder but asked often enough that Google should be able to tell you.

HTH,

  --dzm