Learning gnus for email only (Was: Re: Emacs Mailer Options)

[harel barzilai]

Thanks for all the suggestions in the previous thread "Emacs Maier
Options"..I will look into the other options suggested (including rmail
antispam), and will add the tutorial url to the gnus.org manu urls I've
been reading.. but only so many minutes per day and so far I've
invested some good hours into the gnus-as-email reader pathway and it
looks workable...and hope a handful of questions here can have at least
that solution "up and running" for me..I might be only 3 or so
questions away from being able to use gnus for my purposes

(I was somewhat relieved to find
http://www.cyphertext.net/~gfish/mrd/gnus-overview.html which stated,
"To supplement the online Gnus manuals this is a brief overview of the
system. The online docs really do have a lot of information, but I had
a very hard time getting started with them, especially using Gnus to
read mail." so I'm not the only one who has struggled with the online
site (gnus.org/manual.html) but alas even "gfish" intro skips some
"chapter zero" items) So here goes with the questions..

A brief recap of my situation is at the bottom, skippable if you've
read it in my previous posts: but bottom line is I *must* use the
~/Maildir/ directory in my home dir in the shell account I have with
dreamhost.com and into which I ssh (via text only terminal program)
and from which shell I run emacs.. In the account in question all mail
is automatically put into ~/Maildir/ for me (or into new/ etc
subdirectories thereof I guess) My questions are..

1) Am I correct in my impression that I should NOT take the advice
   from the FAQ that

;; Q4.11 Using Gnus for mail and never news
;; Sam Falkner <samf@beehive.frii.com> writes:
;;   I'd like to use gnus to do my email at work, without doing usenet
news
;;   *at all*.
;;
;;   Rich Pieri <rich.pieri@prescienttech.com> responds:
;;   Change your primary select method to your mail backend:
;;
;; (setq gnus-select-method '(nnml ""))
;; (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods nil)

since it seems that "nnml" is one of the "backends" and if I want
Maildir format for my files, then I'd better not use "nnml"

2) If I correctly understand "6.3.2 Getting Started Reading Mail"
(http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_160.html) then the place to put
my preferences is ~/.gnus.el and in my case instead of:

 (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnml "")))

I'll want to put something like

(setq gnus-select-method '(nnmaildir ""))
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods nil)

Since 6.3.13.5 "Maildir" (http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_180.html#SEC180)
indicates "nnmaildir" is the name for the Maildir format for mail
preference. And do I have the correct exact format in the above two
lines for my .gnus.el? (I also assume it's ok to M-x byte-compile
it and have emacs thus use .gnus.elc?)

3) If I understood correctly, somewhere in the Gnus Manual it said
that I can just let gnus read directly from the ~/Maildir/ directory
rather than have it make copies, yes? And, since gnus normally makes
~/Mail/ the directory, and since dreamhost.com's setup (which I had
better not tinker with, see note at bottom) automatically delivers my
incoming email in Maildir format into ~/Maildir/ then what it appears
I want and need to do it to tell gnus to change that..I think I've
found the answer here " 6.3.4.3 Mail Source Customization"
(http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_165.html)

;; mail-source-ignore-errors
;;     If non-nil, ignore errors when reading mail from a mail source.
;;
;; mail-source-directory
;;     Directory where files (if any) will be stored. The default is
;; '~/Mail/'.    At present, the only thing this is used for is to say
;;     where the incoming files will be stored if the previous variable
;;     is nil.
;;
;; mail-source-incoming-file-prefix
;;     Prefix for file name for storing incoming mail. The default is
;;     'Incoming' in which case files will end up with names like
;;     'Incoming30630D_' or 'Incoming298602ZD'. This is really only
;;     relevant if mail-source-delete-incoming is nil.

So if I follow, then I need to set the mail-source-directory
variable to "~/Maildir/" ..And put it into my ~/.gnus.el yes? What is
the exact format (I do not speak elisp..).

3b) Lastly here, do I need to worry about the
mail-source-incoming-file-prefix? The manual seemed to indicate to
just go ahead and let gnus mess with (i.e., change) the individual
files where individual mail messages are, in the original "spool"
directory rather than have a separate copy..but what if the format
gnus uses is different than the format in which the files arrive? For
example, using test messages, I see the Maildir spool looks like this:
inside the ~/Maildir there are directories.. and inside "new/" the
file names look like this:

--------------------------------------------------

*    /home/user_a/Maildir/new:
*   used 16 available 988114812
*
*   drwx------  2 user_a pg6640 4096 2007-01-01 01:47 .
*   drwx------  6 user_a pg6640 4096 2006-12-31 01:32 ..
*   -rw-------  1 user_a   5090 1849 2006-12-31 01:07
1167545251.23134_0.looneymail-mx1
*   -rw-------  1 user_a   5090 1600 2006-12-31 00:51
1167544309.22136_1.looneymail-mx1

--------------------------------------------------


which appears to be a different name scheme than the one gnus uses
with it's "incoming" ..no problems will result from using gnus
on ~/Maildir with this setup?

4) Once I have the above settled, I can hopefully start reading the
mail from my ~/Maildir/ and was wondering, should I then worry about:

;;   Subject: Q4.4 What happened to my new mail groups?
;;
;;   I got new mail, but I have never seen the groups they should have
;;   been placed in.
;;
;;   They are probably there, but as zombies. Press 'A z' to list
zombie
;;   groups, and then subscribe to the groups you want with 'u' This is
;;   all documented quite nicely in the user's manual.
;;
;; http://www.faqs.org/faqs/gnus-faq/

Thanks,
Harel

(Brief Recap of my situation, skippable if you've read it in previous
posts: my GNU/linux shell provider dreamhost.com switched to Maildir
format from mbox some years ago, making it impossible for me to use
rmail..they did a one-time switch to have all my mail be in one 'mbox'
format file, so I've been able to read w/rmail..but spam has grown
(and grown and..) over these years and dreamhost's built-in antispam
works only if I switch to maildir format..(due to dreamhost's rules
it's too risky for me to try to install a local antispam at this time)
so emacs mail readers which understand maildir format are what I
need..trying to learn gnus for just reading mail so I can avoid 20+
spams/day..will look into gnus for usenet later..using google for now)
I've used the dreamhost web based panel to create a user "usera" with
a separate shell that has the standard setup whereby all email is
automatically put into its ~/Maildir/ directory. Once I figure out
a workable emacs mail reader that can do this I'll switch over my
existing "harel" user/shell  account to that as well..