Re: Read/process mbox file in Gnus

[Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

On Friday,  6 Nov 2020 at 12:40, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> I was out riding around (new bike day <https://flic.kr/p/2k3WWdr> 😀) and

Nice! :-)

> it occurred to me that the way I am using mbox files is just as a
> transmission tool. [...] I'm going to guess Gnus saves metadata in
> ~/.newsrc.eld. It's not clear how well it would take to me pulling the
> rug out from under it by replacing the previous u.mbox file with a
> completely new one without also somehow performing careful surgery on
> its metadata (assuming I also use it as my normal mail reader).

I would not recommend playing around with .newsrc.eld directly.

However, I'm not sure you need to.  If you use the u.mbox file as a
"source", i.e. it's emptied by gnus when read, say into an nnml group,
there won't be any inconsistency.  Likewise, your destination mbox files
could be places where you save articles (e.g. using
gnus-summary-save-article, bound to o in the summary view) to and these
will also not be files that gnus will try to keep track of.  Whether
they are empty or not when you ask gnus to save an article to such a
file will not matter as it appends to the file.

Note, you'll want to customize gnus-default-article-saver to use your
desired format (gnus-summary-save-in-mail likely).

-- 
Eric S Fraga via Emacs 28.0.50 & org 9.4 on Debian bullseye/sid