Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: Using gnus somewhat painful?

[Gregory Novak]

Alex Kavanagh <address@hidden> writes:
> I've not used Gnus but I do use Wanderlust and it has excellent IMAP
> support including a very good offline mode.  Configuration can be a
> bit tricky, but it really does have one of the best offline IMAP
> handling I've come across.

Interesting: I looked at Wanderlust some time ago but decided not to
pursue it since I don't speak Japanese and I wasn't sure how "alive"
the developement was.  How has your experience been as far as the
"vitality" of the community, and esp. getting help given that much of
the documentation/mailing list traffic seems to be in Japanese?

Seth Falcon <address@hidden> writes:
> Not wanting to give up IMAP, I went for a rather complex solution:
>
>  - Installed dovcot, a small-ish IMAP server on my laptop (!)
>  - Ran offlineimap, a clever IMAP sync program that can sync between
>    IMAP servers.

Hmm.  This sounds like it would solve my problem... How complex to you
mean by "complex"?  Do you mean "Should not be attempted by mere
mortals" or "If you can make any sense of the Gnus manual, you have a
shot at getting it to work."?  

Seth Falcon <address@hidden> writes:
> Finally, I just gave up on IMAP and decided that I will almost always
> access my mail from the same machine (laptop).  My current setup is:

JimJim Crossley <address@hidden> writes:
> All due respect, but you're kinda swimming upstream with this one.  I
> wouldn't try to use Gnus as an IMAP mirroring system.  Would a POP
> backend make more sense as a means to "just download all my messages
> and be done with it"?

I find this unpalateable since I want my mail to live on a machine
that's backed up fully and regularly.  Recently I was doing something
like this but then a disk died and I lost some e-mail I didn't want to
lose.  That was painful enough that I don't want to repeat it.

Michael Olson <address@hidden> writes:
> Make sure you *don't* use any gnus-demon functions, unless you like
> having Emacs hang every N minutes when you're on a bad connection.
> Hitting C-g is also more likely to succeed when the gnus-demon
> functions are not used.

I've started running a separate copy of Emacs for mail so that I _can_
use the gnus-demon functions, because they seem to keep the imap
connection alive.  It'd be best to just "ping" the server via the imap
protocol rather than all the business about checking the mail, etc,
but in the absence of functionality to do that, having the demon check
mail occasionally works the best for me.

Of course, this makes the whole solution less attractive since what I
wanted to achieve in the first place was having all of my e-mail and
to-do stuff accessible to each other through a single system.  Now I
have to worry about _which_ copy of emacs I'm using to do various
things.  But it's progress.

Crossley <address@hidden> writes:
> Oddly enough, I use gnus from two different machines, each pointed to
> the same IMAP server, and only one of them misbehaves as you state.
> That one has another IMAP backend and a bunch of splitting rules, so
> I've been chalking it up to some sort of race condition.
>
> Regardless, it's a *NEW* bug.  I've used the same config with older

This is certainly encouraging to hear.  :-)

Thanks for everyone's help!
Greg