Re: Emacs mailreader that doesn't move the spool

[Emanuel Berg]

Hikaru Ichijyo <ichijyo@macross.sdf.jp> writes:

> I'm strongly leaning toward either VM or Gnus if I did
> migrate, but I really want to keep my mailbox where it
> is.  Is there any way to do that?

I use Gnus, but before that I used Rmail. I can really
recommend both of those... like night and day compared
to Gmail and those other web mail GUIs.

But, I was always happy to have my mails on my
disk. That way, I can use my own tools to, for example,
search my mails. That proved to be even easier with
Gnus, or at least the way I set it up (with nnml), than
with Rmail, because with Gnus I got a one-mail-per-file
solution.

Now, if you want to preserve your inbox (just download
it, or the parts of it that is new, and never delete
anything), in Rmail, there is

(setq rmail-preserve-inbox t)

With Gnus, I don't know, I don't even know if Gnus does
that. But if it does, I'm sure that could be configured
as Gnus uses files with meta data to keep track on
what's new and what's old. You might know that Gnus is
also a Usenet reader. If you check for new articles in a
newsgroup, and you get zero back, obviously that isn't a
sign Gnus deleted them all on the server :) I think the
same can be setup for mails, and that wouldn't be that
difficult, as those (mail and news) in my experience are
very close in Gnus (and why not?).

You can ask on gnu.emacs.gnus - it may take some time,
but you'll get an answer!

However... if you also want drafts, outbox, etc. to be
mirrored anywhere you go, that's a whole different story
that will require some work.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573