Re: using movemail directly in .emacs

[Hikaru Ichijyo]

W. Greenhouse <wgreenhouse@riseup.net> wrote:

In article <mailman.634.1399184068.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> you 
wrote:

> 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.

I only mentioned RMAIL because I think the movemail Lisp program is
provided for its sake in Emacs.  I'd probably be using VM though.  While
I'm using Emacs, probably there will be new emails received, and I may
delete messages.  Whatever has happened while I'm working on my mailbox
in Emacs will need to be restored to the system spool afterward.  Do you
think VM will put metadata in my mailbox that other mailers couldn't
deal with?

> 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.

Sorry, I appreciate the advantages of Maildir, but I'm really trying to 
keep a regular Berkeley mbox file in my /var/spool/mail.

If I wanted to manually invoke movemail in my .emacs as part of startup 
and shutdown hooks, what would that look like?

-- 
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent
that will reach to himself.
                                        --Thomas Paine