Re: General advice - incorporating gmail IMAP

[Tassilo Horn]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

Hi Harry,

> Now I'd like to add gmail using its IMAP server.

,----[ (info "(gnus)Connecting to an IMAP Server") ]
| Connecting to an IMAP can be very easy.  Type `B' in the group buffer,
| or (if your primary interest is reading email), say something like:
| 
|      (setq gnus-select-method
|            '(nnimap "imap.gmail.com"))
| 
|    You'll be prompted for a user name and password.  If you grow tired
| of that, then add the following to your `~/.authinfo' file:
| 
|      machine imap.gmail.com login <username> password <password> port imap
| 
|    That should basically be it for most users.
`----

Well, since you already have some servers, you probably want to add that
to your `gnus-secondary-select-methods'.

> My aim is a bit more than just receiving mail that way.  I hope to be
> able to subscribe to various google groups by mail and end up with
> something sort of similar to nntp access to those groups.

I do exactly that using my fastmail account.  Therefore, I do
server-side SIEVE message splitting using the List-Id header, so that
all messages of a mailing list go into one special group.  That works
totally great! :-)

Now the sad news: Gmail doesn't support any advanced splitting.  It has
some web-gui for some simple splitting according to to and from headers,
but only a very limited subset of SIEVE.

And now again good news: Gnus can split imap locally, and the local mail
splitting is propagated back to the server.  However, I never used that,
so I have to refer to the docs:

,----[ (info "(gnus)Client-Side IMAP Splitting") ]
| Many people prefer to do the sorting/splitting of mail into their mail
| boxes on the IMAP server.  That way they don't have to download the
| mail they're not all that interested in.
| 
|    If you do want to do client-side mail splitting, then the following
| variables are relevant:
| 
| `nnimap-inbox'
|      This is the IMAP mail box that will be scanned for new mail.
| 
| `nnimap-split-methods'
|      Uses the same syntax as `nnmail-split-methods' (*note Splitting
|      Mail::), except the symbol `default', which means that it should
|      use the value of the `nnmail-split-methods' variable.
| 
| `nnimap-split-fancy'
|      Uses the same syntax as `nnmail-split-fancy'.
| 
| `nnimap-unsplittable-articles'
|      List of flag symbols to ignore when doing splitting.  That is,
|      articles that have these flags won't be considered when splitting.
|      The default is `(%Deleted %Seen)'.
| 
| 
|    Here's a complete example `nnimap' backend with a client-side
| "fancy" splitting method:
| 
|      (nnimap "imap.example.com"
|              (nnimap-inbox "INBOX")
|              (nnimap-split-methods
|               (| ("MailScanner-SpamCheck" "spam" "spam.detected")
|                  (to "foo@bar.com" "foo")
|                  "undecided")))
`----


> gmail IMAP needs some particular kind of access and authentication all
> described in googles documentation.

Nah, not really.  Since you seem to be using a very current Gnus
version, Gmail should work out of the box.  (At least, it does for me.)

Bye,
Tassilo