>>>>> "PW" == Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman@mindspring.com> writes:
PW> I was happily using pine for email (I know, not totally "debian"), but
PW> played with emacs, just to check it out. After _sending_ an email from
PW> emacs, I gained directories - harmless enough. After _reading_ email in
PW> emacs, my pine inbox, which had about 500 messages in it, is
PW> empty. Where'd they go?
Did you use "M-x rmail" to read your email? If you did, emacs took
your mailspool and converted it to a Babyl format file called RMAIL.
This is a minor `gotcha' in emacs -- Charles Sebold talks about it in
his "Why I Became an Emacs User" essay:
http://www.messengers-of-messiah.org/~csebold/emacs/why.phtml
If you have an 'RMAIL' file in your home directory, you can use the
M-x unrmail command to convert this into an ordinary mbox file. You
can then tack that mbox file on to the end of your mailspool
(cat converted_mbox >> /var/mail/you) to put the messages back in your mailspool.
(double >>)
If you can, you may want to suspend mail delivery when you do that, in
case sendmail decides to write to the mailspool at the same time you
do. (Incidentally, does anyone know a better way to lock a mailspool
before appending messages to it?)
--Joe
--
Joseph Barillari -- http://barillari.org
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