Re: Converting to Gnus

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Sun, 01 Aug 2004, neil@suespammers.org wrote:

> [Gnus] certainly seems to me to be the most configurable news/mail
> system I've ever seen. Perhaps even a little daunting!

I think it's fun.  Gnus is the only MUA I know that is fun to learn
and extend, not just to play with the Preferences dialog.

>> For both your fetchmail and procmail setups, I recommend getting Gnus
>> running without them and then gradually converting if you don't know
>> Gnus well yet.  It will be a less stressful conversion.
> 
> Is there a "best" way of doing this? For example, most mail
> utillities/MUA's and news-agents I've used before assume ~/Mail and
> ~/News as their default directories. Am I right in saying that Gnus
> prefers to have sole access to its own directories?

Not necessarily, but certainly you can change those defaults.

> Therefore, if I do for example:
> 
> (setq gnus-directory "~/.News/")
> (setq message-directory "~/.Mail/")
> 
> how can I then incorporate my old, previously read mail (which is in
> ~/Mail) into my new Gnus setup?
> 
> (I have rather a lot of old news, stored in some rather large mbox
> files.) 

I think this was answered separately.

>> If you plan to run something else that will access the mail outside of
>> Gnus, especially for writing (e.g. an IMAP server), you should use
>> nnmaildir.  It's built for concurrent access.  nnml is fast, sure, but
>> nnmaildir is not significantly slower in my experience.
> 
> I would like to plan for that eventuality. Although at present I only
> have POP3 mail sources, I'm planning to get an account at fastmail.fm,
> from which I can use IMAP. Can I mix the two backends, dependant on
> mail source?

I'm not sure what you mean.  You can use IMAP for real (through the
nnimap backend), or you can use it as a mail source to another
backend.  Is that what you are asking?

Ted