Re: Using fetchmail with gnus (on Windows)

[Peter Davis <pd@world.std.com>]

Josh Huber <huber@alum.wpi.edu> writes:

> Peter Davis <pd@world.std.com> writes:
> 
> > Ok, I see that I had been using 
> >
> > 	(setq nnmail-movemail-program 'pop3-nnmail-movemail)
> >
> > when I was trying to use pop3 as a mail source.  If I want to use a
> > spool file as a mail source, and nnml as a backend, what should this
> > be set to?  I'd like to read the messages from the spool file, and
> > split them into various nnml groups.
> 
> Chances are pretty good that you don't want to be changing the value
> of nnmail-movemail-program, but I'm not sure as that variable doesn't
> exist in Oort.

Oh great.  So once I finally get everything working, I'll have to
change it all when Oort becomes real?  ;^)


> > Perhaps someone with more experience with the actual released version
> of Gnus can answer you here.  The value of my equivilant variable
> (mail-source-movemail-program) is nil.  After looking at the code,
> when this variable is nil, it looks for the "movemail" program and
> uses that.
> 
> I suggest setting nnmail-movemail-program to nil, or even better, just
> leaving it at the default value.

Ok, I've got *no* setting for nnmail-movemail-program at all, and I'm
*still* not getting any messages from the spool file.

Does anyone have a working gnus 5.8.8 or 5.9 setup that actually reads
/var/spool/mail/... successfully?  I'm at my wit's end (not a long
trip) here.

> > > Locking is not an issue.  I want to use fetchmail to get messages
> > from a couple of POP3 servers, and put all the messages into
> > /var/spool/mail/pdavis.  Then I want Gnus to read messages from
> > there, and split them into my various nnml groups.  I plan to run
> > fetchmail explicitly as a :prescript on the mail source, so there
> > should be no problem with locking.
> 
> I see, I thought you would be using it in daemon mode.  Gnus still
> doesn't like it when you modify a file while it's running.

I won't use daemon mode because I want my office mail left on the POP
server when I'm out, so I can read it at home, and vice versa.  In
fact, it's this nasty business of wanting to leave mail on one server
and not another that's started me looking at fetchmail in the first
place.

> > > I had thought that nnmbox was a back-end, an alternative to nnml, to
> > determine how the messages could be saved by Gnus, not how they
> > would be input to Gnus.  Are you saying that I could just read the
> > spool file using the nnmbox backend, and manually move the messages
> > elsewhere if I wanted to?
> 
> Actually you could use nndoc to at least view the spool and move
> messages elsewhere.  nndoc is a read-only backend which allows access
> to many single-file mailbox formats.
> 
> In the *Groups* buffer, hit G f and type the path to your spool file.
> You should be able to at least view and move messages elsewhere.
> 
> I don't think this is a good solution though -- getting the
> mail-sources working right is the best way to go.

Agreed!  I would like the spool file to work as a mail source.

Thanks for all your help.

-pd


-- 
--------
                             Peter Davis
               Funny stuff at http://www.pfdstudio.com
                 The artwork formerly shown as prints
    List of resources for children's writers and illustrators at:
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