Re: Handling mail

[Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us>]

> Gnus, yes. But BBDB?
>
>   "BBDB 2.35 is the current stable released version, released on 
>   January 30, 2007."
>
> Seems rather old to me...
>
> I treat mail and news as two different sources of information.

We all do. Gnus will treat mail different than news if you want.

(I use a local Dovecot IMAP server + offlineimap for mail, gwene for RSS
and Gmane and some local news-server for news). 

> For mail, every message stays in my mailbox until I explicitly file or
> delete it. When I tried Gnus to read mail (years ago) I couldn't get it
> to just leave the messages. After reading a message it must be kept
> explictly otherwise it's gone.

You may set a flag in certain groups (I don't remember it at the
moment). If this is set old mails will be shown. Whenever I enter a
mail-group 200 articles are shown. If I want to show more I may using
M-u RET, but usually IMAP search is better (G G).



> - Automatically infer the name of the file to save a message into,
>   depending on the sender name (and using the mail-folder property in
>   the BBDB, if any).

Check out Gnus  posting style (built in) or Gnus Alias. The latter is
much easier to use. 

> - In the summary, display the name of the recipient if the sender is me
>   ('me' being a list of mail addresses). This is particularly handy
>   since I save BCC's of outgoing messages in my primary mailbox.

There are some variables and functions concerned with your mail. I have
never used them.

> - Automatically (or on demand) change my from, reply-to, selected
>   headers and signature depending on which of my email addresses the
>   message was sent to.

Again, Gnus Alias or Gnus Posting style will do what you want.

For example using Gnus-Alias my name and mail is changed when I post to
a news-group. Inspecting my from line the proper SMTP server is chosen.

> I guess I have to bite the bullit and throw away my VM and Gnus config
> and start from scratch, using the features that are available now.

You will be very happy. (My Gnus config is a mere 400 lines :)

–Rasmus

-- 
Sent from my Emacs