Re: beginner splitting mail

[Emanuel Berg]

Steven Arntson <steven@stevenarntson.com> writes:

> So it looks like this /is/ working; I spake too
> soon. I thought it would retroactively refile all of
> the old month-by-month emails I had, which it didn't,
> but it is successfully routing new sent
> mails. Excellent!
>
> Is there a way to refile or reprocess those old
> emails so they fall under the new heading?

Yes, this is called "respooling" - but, in what state
are your old emails? If you have them in a Gnus group,
then perhaps the below defun can help you. The
operative piece of Elisp is of course
`gnus-summary-respool-article', you can use
`describe-function' to find out more. But, if you don't
have the old stuff in a group, you have to not respool
but, uhm, *spool* it from the disk or wherever. This is
of course possible but someone else has to help you on
that. (I suppose you can check out how the new stuff is
organized and arrange the old stuff like that with some
sed or awk or whatever. But this should not be needed
as Gnus most likely has this situation accounted for.)

(defun respool-mail ()
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (let ((lines (count-lines (point-min) (point-max))))
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (gnus-summary-respool-article
       lines
       (gnus-find-method-for-group "nnml:mail.misc") ))))

> It seems like my .gnus file is presently telling the
> system to use two similarly-purposed backends ... how
> do I manage get myself into these situations?! :) Do
> you have any opinion about nnml vs. nnmbox for
> someone accessing gnus locally as the sole user of a
> reasonably modern PC?

I'm a practical guy so at the moment it works I stop
thinking about it, so I can't tell you. nnml works for
me because I like the mails 1) on my disk, and 2) in
separate files. The reason is I would like to be able
to use Emacs and the shell tools on my mails and
sentmails, directly, as files. For example if I
remember some guy but only his first name, I can grep
for that, and so on. But if you are curious, read the
URL I posted, it has sections both for nnml and nnmbox.

-- 
underground experts united:
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573