From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: lee Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: using movemail directly in .emacs Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 03:35:37 +0200 Organization: my virtual residence Message-ID: <871tvd8iza.fsf@yun.yagibdah.de> References: <87oayigbko.fsf@robertthorpeconsulting.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1401328574 25254 80.91.229.3 (29 May 2014 01:56:14 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 01:56:14 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Thu May 29 03:56:08 2014 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1WppZc-0005Bk-SL for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Thu, 29 May 2014 03:56:04 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:45712 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1WppZc-0000My-I0 for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Wed, 28 May 2014 21:56:04 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:40232) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1WppZ8-0000DS-KQ for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Wed, 28 May 2014 21:55:39 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1WppZ3-0004KX-3a for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Wed, 28 May 2014 21:55:34 -0400 Original-Received: from client-194-42-186-216.muenet.net ([194.42.186.216]:40060 helo=yun.yagibdah.de) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1WppZ2-0004Iz-Sg for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Wed, 28 May 2014 21:55:29 -0400 Original-Received: from lee by yun.yagibdah.de with local (Exim 4.80.1) (envelope-from ) id 1WppYz-00038i-Vz for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Thu, 29 May 2014 03:55:25 +0200 In-Reply-To: <87oayigbko.fsf@robertthorpeconsulting.com> (Robert Thorpe's message of "Tue, 27 May 2014 22:23:51 +0100") User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.4.50 (gnu/linux) Mail-Followup-To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.2.x-3.x [generic] X-Received-From: 194.42.186.216 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:97924 Archived-At: Robert Thorpe writes: > lee writes: >> The anachronism is storing many emails in one file. > > I agree that storing gigabytes of email in a single file is unwise. > [...] > > In general though storing lots of emails in a file isn't really a > problem. > [...] > Mbox files are very simple, it's hard to get writing to them > wrong. That goes only as long as everything works as intended. Have a power failure or a yet-unnoticed disk failure, have your MUA crash due to some bug or because the system kills it because it`s out of memory, have your computer crash or freeze, have some issue with a network file system or other things that don`t come to mind atm --- and your whole file with all the mails may be gone. Deal with a single (relatively small) file, and chances are that only this single file is affected. > You're right about flags though. Mbox files aren't very portable > between mailers for that reason. Another, bigger, problem is coding > systems. Thunderbird (for example) treats mbox files as ASCII [1]. If > you get a UTF-8 email in Thunderbird then it inserts it as base64 (well > I assume it's base64) into the mbox. On the other hand in Rmail seems to > inserts it as UTF-8. Both work correctly but in their own way. Hm, so you need to somehow identify such base64 encoded files and decode them when searching ... that`s awkward. > I'm not saying that it's best to use mbox files, but the problems with > them aren't large. Large directory structures have other problems. Problems like? > [1] - I think it's ASCII, it may be Latin-1 or something. -- Knowledge is volatile and fluid. Software is power.