Re: Read/process mbox file in Gnus

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> writes:

> I recently switched to Manjaro from Ubuntu and decided to (finally) give
> Gnus a try (VM no longer seems to be actively maintained and I'd prefer not
> to install it from source different than everything else - which comes via
> elpa/melpa). Up 'til now, I've used VM to do the mail processing for my
> spam work related to mail.python.org. The workflow goes something like this:
>
>    1. Assemble an mbox file of unsure messages on mail.python.org (mpo)
>    2. Download it to my laptop
>    3. Process it, saving some messages as spam, others as ham, and
>    discarding the rest
>    4. Upload the new spam and ham mbox files to mpo
>    5. Retrain the system with the new messages
>
> I have been using VM for step three. I'd like to do that with Gnus. Looking
> through the manual, skimming Google search output and skimming an apropos
> list of gnus commands I didn't see an obvious way to read a Unix mbox file.
> I'm sure I must be missing something basic. Pointers appreciated.

The easiest thing to do will be to follow the workflow here:

(gnus) Incorporating Old Mail

That requires you to manually mark and respool all the messages in the
resulting group, but maybe that's actually what you want -- to
explicitly deal with each message.

I'd be curious to know if Gnus+tramp can handle a remote filename
transparently here -- you might be able to skip step 2.

The only other solution that I would consider "normal" here is to have
the message dump (whether remote or local) set up as a "mail source" in
Gnus ("Mail Sources" in the manual). Gnus then knows that it should
regularly check that source for new messages to fetch. You could either
use mail splitting to do a bit of automatic pre-processing, or just
specify that all incoming messages should go to a single group.

mbox doesn't seem to be one of the supported mail source formats,
though. maildir is, and I also wonder if the "directory" specifier might
work. Maybe you can stick the mbox file in a particular directory, then
set the directory specifier's :path keyword to that directory, and the
:suffix keyword to ".mbox".

Someone else might have tried this before?

HTH,
Eric