Re: rmail

[Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com>]

"h.peter.friedrich" <not-real@arcor.de> writes:

> hello,
> I use rmail with the above email-address, but I want to leave this
> provider.
> My favorite possible new provider uses the email-address as loginname.
> But rmail cannot handle the "@ " inside the name.
> I found in the emacswiki that this is a known problem.
> Is it solved in the meantime and how can I solve it ?

This is how I do it:
* Fix your email address.
In rmail-primary-inbox-list specify your email address replacing @ with
%40 like this: you%40server.com.

* Use Mailutils Movemail.
It's usually available from a package manager.  I don't know if this is
necessary, but it's how I did it.

* Copy.
Copy the function rmail-insert-inbox-text from rmail.el.  After you've
fixed it save off this new version of rmail-insert-inbox-text and load
it in your init file.

* Find the bit that says:
      ;; At this point, TOFILE contains the name to read:
      ;; Either the alternate name (if we renamed)
      ;; or the actual inbox (if not renaming).

* Add the fix.
After the comment put in the line:
      (setq tofile (url-unhex-string tofile))
The line after that should be (if (file-exists-p tofile).


Here's why that works....  Movemail's command-line has the server
address after the email address.  It's like this "movemail
you@imap.server.com".  So, if your email address has an @ in it then it
becomes "movemail you@server.com@imap.server.com" which is nonsense.
The movemail people are aware of this problem, so they support using URL
encoding in addresses.  So, you can use %40 instead of @ for the first
one, just like in a URL.  Emacs doesn't know about any of this.  The
problem is that they decode it when creating the mbox filename.  So,
Emacs is expecting an mbox file called you%40server.com but it gets one
called you@server.com.  The line of code added removes that confusion.

When I get the time I'll contribute it to Emacs.  I don't think it's the
right way to totally fix the problem though.

BR,
Robert Thorpe