Re: How to set up Emacs as a mail client (with mail saved/filed on an IMAP server)

[N. Jackson]

Following up, for completeness, on my own post:

> The only real inconvenience remaining is that when I configure
> variables for Gnus the values are global, and I don't see yet how to
> restrict their scope to a particular server or group or retrieval
> method.

I have now found the solution to this as well. :)

Not that it was hidden; it was lying about in plain sight, I just failed
to recognise it at first. It is "Group Parameters", of course. ("Of
course" now that I know what it's called.)  One uses it to override
global Gnus settings (including display settings) for a specific Group
or Groups (specified by name using a regular expression).

For more information, from within Gnus: C-c TAB i Group Parameters RET.

So I now have the following in my .gnus.el and it does exactly what I
want:

(setq gnus-parameters
    ; Settings for all IMAP groups (could be more discerning, but this
    ; works just fine for now):
    '(("nnimap*"
        (gnus-large-newsgroup 6000) ; Suppress prompts for now.
        (display . all) ; Show previously-read mail too.
        (gnus-show-threads nil) ; Don't organise by threads.
        ; Sort chronologically with newest at top:
        (gnus-article-sort-functions '((not gnus-article-sort-by-date)))
      )
     )
)

(The (gnus-large-newsgroup 6000) is only in there temporarily, to prevent
Gnus from deciding that it better ask me how many headers to download,
there being rather a lot. Normally the Gnus global default threshold of
200 would be more than ample -- I rarely keep more that 50 mails in my
inbox at one time, but, because I haven't had an easily usable mail set
up for a few months, my main inbox is rather full of stuff that needs
filing and I was getting annoyed by the prompts every time I opened it!)

There are also Topic Parameters, but I didn't get in to those yet!