[Discuss] Running a mail server, or not

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 02:44:00AM +0000, Mike Small wrote:
> Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > On 6/28/2018 4:03 PM, Mike Small wrote:

> An issue I expect to run into is that when I read my email at a real
> computer I'll ssh in, start emacs with it loading Gnus, and that takes
> email out of my spool and splits it off into different folders based on
> a list of regular expressions (there are various options Gnus supports
> for mail storage but I chose nnml:
> http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_84.html#Mail-Spool). I'm thinking IMAP
> won't pick up the mails where Gnus put them. Doesn't IMAP have it's own
> idea of what a folder is and how that's to be set up?

I'm in a bit of pain right now, so this isn't as diplomatically
worded as it should be. Sorry.

Let's talk about "best practices".

Consulting companies love to write huge documents on "best
practices" that they can re-use for customer after customer,
telling them what they ought to be doing.

As a sysadmin, "best practices" doesn't mean following one of
those ridiculous guides. It means assessing your situation,
surveying the options, and choosing something that fits your
needs and allows the spectrum of choices in the future as
unconstrained as possible.

So when the very first line of the entry is:

  The nnml spool mail format isn?t compatible with any other known
  format. It should be used with some caution. 

you should read that as "don't use this, it was an experiment in
being better than everybody else that didn't work out".

That said, the format as described is very similar to NM format,
and reasonably similar to Maildir. I bet it could be converted
into either one (and you should pick Maildir) in about ten lines
of shell.

> And then the IMAP client wouldn't have Gnus's killer feature, the
> ability to "expire" a mail so that it 1. isn't visible again unless I
> open the folder to show read articles and articles with similar kinds of
> marks and 2. in some number of weeks, but not the day before tomorrow
> when I decide I want to keep it after all, it will automatically age out
> and really delete those expired mails. 

The point of having IMAP access on your phone is not to have
every feature from your desktop available on your phone. The
point is to be able to read new messages which are important to
you, search for a message that you need right now, and compose a
short message right now.

All other features can be safely kept on the desktop.

> What I'd really like is if someone made a mobile version of emacs,
> somehow, maybe with some complicated gesture scheme for input. There's
> some emacs person, I think, who's done something to make it possible to
> keep two Gnusae's set of folders in sync across two machines. So if I
> could run Gnus on the phone and use that person's scripts, that would be
> the ideal. Probably will never happen.

If Gnus read IMAP, you would get this for free.

Oh, it does.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Connecting-to-an-IMAP-Server.html#Connecting-to-an-IMAP-Server

In fact, here's what the manual says about IMAP:

 6.3 Using IMAP

  The most popular mail backend is probably nnimap, which provides
  access to IMAP servers. IMAP servers store mail remotely, so the
  client doesn't store anything locally. This means that it's a
  convenient choice when you're reading your mail from different
  locations, or with different user agents. 


-dsr-