Rmail, movemail and maildir

Rmail, movemail and maildir

[Mike Gran]

Hello.  This is my first time ever asking for help on emacs, but,
this one has me stumped.

(This is GNU Emacs 25.1.1 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu))

I'm trying to set up old-school rmail, and I want it to fetch
mail from a Maildir directory on my home filesystem.  According to
the instructions, I need to install movemail, which I did, and
then set some variables.  So my .emacs now has

;; MAIL
(setq rmail-movemail-program "/usr/local/bin/movemail")
(setq rmail-primary-inbox-list '("maildir:///home/mike/Maildir"))
(setq rmail-movemail-flags (list "-p --emacs"))

But I can't get emacs rmail to invoke movemail.

I can run movemail manually like so, which works.

movemail -p --emacs maildir:///home/mike/Maildir ~/RMAIL --verbose

The docs here are actually a bit unclear.  They discuss how to make
a URL for a mailbox for movemail, but they don't tell you where
that URL should go.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Movemail.html

Thanks in advance,

Mike Gran

Re: Rmail, movemail and maildir

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Mike Gran" <spk121@yahoo.com>
> Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2017 07:21:03 -0700
> 
> But I can't get emacs rmail to invoke movemail.

Not sure what you mean by "can't", but typing 'g' in Rmail should
invoke movemail.

Re: Rmail, movemail and maildir

[Glenn Morris]

"Mike Gran" wrote:

> (This is GNU Emacs 25.1.1 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu))
>
> I'm trying to set up old-school rmail, and I want it to fetch
> mail from a Maildir directory on my home filesystem.

By experiment, it looks to me that Rmail doesn't support this.
I'm not sure why it's mentioned in the documentation.

Same issue a decade ago:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2008-02/msg00355.html

Re: Rmail, movemail and maildir

[Glenn Morris]

PS mu4e is a great Emacs mail client that works natively with Maildir.
https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

The best Rmail is going to do, even if this issue gets fixed,
is a one-way conversion of your Maildir Inbox to mbox format.

Re: Rmail, movemail and maildir

[Robert Thorpe]

"Mike Gran" <spk121@yahoo.com> writes:

> Hello.  This is my first time ever asking for help on emacs, but,
> this one has me stumped.
>
> (This is GNU Emacs 25.1.1 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu))
>
> I'm trying to set up old-school rmail, and I want it to fetch
> mail from a Maildir directory on my home filesystem.  According to
> the instructions, I need to install movemail, which I did, and
> then set some variables.  So my .emacs now has
>
> ;; MAIL
> (setq rmail-movemail-program "/usr/local/bin/movemail")
> (setq rmail-primary-inbox-list '("maildir:///home/mike/Maildir"))
> (setq rmail-movemail-flags (list "-p --emacs"))
>
> But I can't get emacs rmail to invoke movemail.
>
> I can run movemail manually like so, which works.
>
> movemail -p --emacs maildir:///home/mike/Maildir ~/RMAIL --verbose
>
> The docs here are actually a bit unclear.  They discuss how to make
> a URL for a mailbox for movemail, but they don't tell you where
> that URL should go.
>
> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Movemail.html

I don't know exactly what's wrong with your setup.

I use movemail from mailutils, I didn't have to do anything to set that
up.  When my distro installed it the emacs movemail stopped being the
default.  I'm not sure exactly how it did that.  The variable
rmail-movemail-program is set to "/usr/bin/movemail".  Emacs customize
tells me that it was changed outside Emacs, but I didn't change it in my
init file.

When you're in Emacs and you have Rmail started there's a function to
tell you which type of movemail you're using.  If you're using mailutils
then if you evaluate: (rmail-movemail-variant-p 'mailutils) then it will
give "t".  If you evaluate (rmail-movemail-variant-p 'emacs) then it
will give "nil".  If you're using the Emacs variant then it will be the
opposite way around.

As far as I can tell you're using the "maildir://" prefix correctly.

You should not need to set the movemail flag "--emacs" since Emacs
always adds that.  I don't think you should need to use "-p" either
unless you need to reverse the message order.

BR,
Robert Thorpe

Re: Rmail, movemail and maildir

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com>
> Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2017 05:29:41 +0100
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> 
> I use movemail from mailutils, I didn't have to do anything to set that
> up.  When my distro installed it the emacs movemail stopped being the
> default.  I'm not sure exactly how it did that.

Rmail looks for the movemail program on PATH before it looks in its
libexec directory, so if movemail from Mailutils is installed, Rmail
will find it first.

Re: Rmail, movemail and maildir

[Mike Gran]

On Thursday, April 6, 2017 7:13 AM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> From: Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com>

>> I use movemail from mailutils, I didn't have to do anything to set that
>> up.  When my distro installed it the emacs movemail stopped being the
>> default.  I'm not sure exactly how it did that.

>Rmail looks for the movemail program on PATH before it looks in its
>libexec directory, so if movemail from Mailutils is installed, Rmail
>will find it first.

Thanks all for looking into it.  There is a problem with my setup.
If I have free time, I'll trace through the code and figure it out.

Re: Rmail, movemail and maildir

[Glenn Morris]

Mike Gran wrote:

> Thanks all for looking into it.  There is a problem with my setup.
> If I have free time, I'll trace through the code and figure it out.

Don't waste your time. Rmail has no working support for Maildir, and
seemingly never has. https://debbugs.gnu.org/26376

Re: Rmail, movemail and maildir

[Robert Thorpe]

Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> writes:

> Mike Gran wrote:
>
>> Thanks all for looking into it.  There is a problem with my setup.
>> If I have free time, I'll trace through the code and figure it out.
>
> Don't waste your time. Rmail has no working support for Maildir, and
> seemingly never has. https://debbugs.gnu.org/26376

After reading the bug report I think that Glenn Morris is right.

It could probably be fixed with a small patch.  However, the function
rmail-insert-inbox-text is very long and diffcult to understand.  So it
wouldn't be simple.

BR,
Robert Thorpe