On 30 Sep 1997, Carey Evans wrote: > Craig Sanders <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > [snip] > > > yep, i read that. i even read the rest of the gnus docs on handling mail. > > > > it seems like it's not going to be any good for me because it doesn't want > > to read an mailbox which has new mail being appended to it. > > You can read existing mbox-type files with the nnfolder and/or nndoc > backends. With efs, you can probably even do it over FTP. But not > with IMAP yet.
yes, but according to the documentation, reading an mbox file which is being appended to by another process (such as mail, deliver, procmail, etc) is a bad thing. the documented way around this, of course, is to have procmail filter mail into one mbox file and then have gnus regularly move it to an mbox of it's own. this would be ok if (a) i didn't have so many incoming folders and (b) i didn't also have to read my mail from numerous hosts with pine/imap...i don't want to have to reconfigure my mail filtering/reading tools on half a dozen hosts just to trial a new way of doing things. it's too much work, and if i end up not liking the new way then it's just as much work again to undo it. this wouldn't be an issue if gnus could do IMAP or if it could use a mail spool file which was shared RW with other processes. I'm sure that neither of these are in the too-hard basket for gnus (after all, pine can do it) but it's only going to get done if someone who can actually code emacs lisp (not me) has a need for it. so, i'll keep on using pine for email right now. and also keep on using gnus for reading news (and maybe set it up for reading/searching my archived mail folders). i've only been using gnus for a week now but i already like it better than anything i've used before (previously i was an 'nn' fan). if gnus ever does gain the capability to work with mail as i need it to then i'll happily switch to it. i am using gnus as a method of learning xemacs. i am really beginning to like the fact that in emacs and gnus i can switch from any buffer to any other buffer at any time. e.g. that means i don't have to finish writing a reply to a newsgroup in order to quickly scan another newsgroup for news of interest. i can see that would be very useful in mail too - i am often reading one of my mailing lists, or replying to a message in one, and need to read my main (/var/spool/mail/cas) inbox....with pine i have to close the current list and go to my inbox. with xemacs i wouldn't have to. i also like the fact that with VIPER, vi emulation is effectively built into the mail/news reader....with pine it takes a few seconds to run vi as an external process every time i want to edit a message. i'll gradually begin to use xemacs for other tasks too - editing config files and web pages and other text files that i currently use vi for. so yeah, i can see great benefits....but not quite enough yet to make me change completely the way i deal with my mail. craig -- craig sanders networking consultant Available for casual or contract temporary autonomous zone system administration tasks. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
