Re: Rmail, Babyl, mbox, emacs 23

[Glenn Morris]

Lewis Perin wrote:

> My ISP just upgraded emacs to 23.1.1.  I was alarmed when it couldn't
> parse my 22-level Babyl rmail file,

This sounds like a bug that should be reported, with as much detail as
possible (starting from emacs -Q) to help it get fixed.

Can you try the 23.1.94 pretest from

http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/

to see if it does any better?

> but I soon learned that running M-x unrmail would fix that.

I'm a bit confused, because internally Emacs uses unrmail to convert
Babyl files to mbox when needed. So I don't see why it would work when
you call it by hand, but not when Emacs calls it.

> Now, though, I face the problem of what happens when I run M-x
> rmail-input against an email archive (also Babyl) created under an
> earlier version of emacs.  23.1.1's Rmail doesn't parse the archive any
> better than it parsed the Babyl version of ~/RMAIL; it gives up with the
> error message "Removing old name: no such file or directory,
> /tmp/rmail17713j4x".

Again, this is a bug.

> When I run unrmail against an archive, that doesn't work either; it
> blows up with "Symbol's value as variable is void: rmail-highlight-face".

This reveals another bug (sigh; now fixed), but if you start emacs as
`emacs -Q' it should not affect you.