Re: gnus losing mail?

[Kai Grossjohann <kgrossjo@eu.uu.net>]

Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.ca> writes:

> Kai Grossjohann <kgrossjo@eu.uu.net> writes:
>
>> Never, never, NEVER let any program write to the files that Gnus is
>> using.  That is, in the default configuration Gnus uses
>> ~/Mail/mail/misc (or ~/Mail/mail.misc) for the default mail group,
>> and if you tell procmail to also write this file, then you'll quickly
>> get into trouble.
>
> Great...that's what I was afraid of.  Well, I was expecting similar
> file handling as other mail clients.  Darn, I was wrong.

It is really difficult for Gnus to do it right, so it doesn't try to
and instead just moves mail out of /var/mail/jrl into its own file.
Then it knows there won't be any conflicts.

> I'm using the nnfolder backend to get my mail out of
> procmail-created mboxes.  Now I have to wonder what a better method
> would be.

It is easy.  You tell procmail to write mail for the group
nnfolder:foo.bar into the file ~/procmail/foo.bar, say.  Then you
tell Gnus to read mail from there into the corresponding groups:

(setq mail-sources '((directory :path "~/procmail/"
                                :suffix "")))

Please note that the file name corresponds to the group name.  That
is, even if the group nnfolder:foo.bar is stored in the file
~/Mail/foo/bar, then the procmail input file should still be
~/procmail/foo.bar, not ~/procmail/foo/bar.  It is best not to think
about which file name a particular group would end up in.

Also note that you could migrate Gnus from nnfolder (which uses one
file per group/folder) to nnml (which uses one file per message), but
the procmail setup would still remain the same.

Does this help?

Kai