Re: using movemail directly in .emacs

[W . Greenhouse]

Hello Hikaru,

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

> Is any of this impossible or misguided?  I'd just strongly prefer my 
> mailbox in the system spool area where most UNIX tools expect it to be.

This sounds vaguely possible but probably misguided. If the goal is
simply to leave mail sitting at the spool, a simpler place to start is

(setq rmail-preserve-inbox t)

which will prevent Movemail from emptying the spool as it delivers to
rmail. I would not think it wise to copy back the RMAIL file to your
system mail spool, because rmail adds its own headers to track
flagged/read/replied/forwarded state and user-generated labels. Ideally,
other mbox-reading clients will just ignore these additional headers,
but rmail is mutating the messages it stores, not just moving or
deleting them, so some potential for problems exists.

As an alternative to flinging an mbox back and forth, you may be able to
have your system MTA deliver your mail directly to your home directory
in the more modern, non-blocking Maildir format, which several clients
can read and edit simultaneously even as mail is being delivered. For
example, at sites where Procmail controls local delivery from the MTA,
you can have a one-line ~/.procmailrc like

DEFAULT=Maildir/

to trigger delivery of all new mail to ~/Maildir/, as a mailbox name
ending in / is interpreted by procmail as a Maildir instead. With
Maildir you could use Mutt, KMail, Emacs's Gnus, and many others to
operate on the same mail store simultaneously, if you wanted. Alpine
requires a patch to support Maildir, and many other older clients such
as BSD mailx do not support it at all, but it is the emerging standard
over the past 10-15 years for UNIX mailclients that operate on a local
store, as well as for mail indexing programs and IMAP servers. And
message metadata such as flagged/read status is stored in the message
filenames themselves, and so is interoperable between clients.

--
Best,
WGG

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