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

[Gregory Novak]

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.

For me, the demon seems to help the imap server stay connected by
maintaining a little bit of traffic.  The ideal would be to have the
demon simply "ping" the server to keep the connection from dying, but
that functionality doesn't seem to exist, so doing a full-fledged
check-for-new-mail seems to work for me.  You're right about emacs
hanging, though: to facilitate this I run a separate copy of emacs.
That's distasteful since part of the point was to get all of my e-mail
and to-do stuff into one environment where everything is accessible at
any time, but oh well...

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 shied away from
it because much of the activity seems to be in Japanese and I couldn't
judge the "vitality" of the development.  How has your experience of
these two things been?  Is the development "alive" and have you been
able to find documentation/help in English?

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.

This sounds nice, but what do you mean by "complex"?  Do you mean
"should not be attempted by mortals" or "if you can make sense of the
Gnus manual, you have a chance at success?"

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:

Jim 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'd like to avoid doing this so that my mail can live on a machine
that's fully and regularly backed up.  I was doing something like this
but then a disk died and I lost some mail that I didn't want to lose.
That was sufficiently painful that I'd like to avoid repeating it.  

Jim Crossley <address@hidden> writes:
> You're not alone.  I've been using Gnus for years, and for me only the
> most recent update (to 5.10.7) has resulted in this...

Well, that's certainly encouraging.

Thanks,
Greg