🚀 go-pugleaf

You would need a program, or set of programs/scripts, to

1) cut each mail message out of the Unix mailbox file

[pretty easy to do; just do a regexp search for the message delimiters]

2) append it to the correct file

[also pretty easy to do; just do a regexp search on the headers and use
whatever language's equivalent to alists to append to the correct file]

2a) possibly convert it to BABYL before appending

[not to difficult; translate the -to-babyl code from rmail.el]

3) get Emacs to read the files (probably call the programs via
   shell-command or something)

[somewhat more difficult; either you have to read each file manually, read
*all* files automatically, or figure out some way of telling Emacs which
files to read (the most difficult)].

Acutally, now that I think of it, it wouldn't be too difficult to write the
whole thing in emacs-lisp. And that would make step 3 significantly easier.

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>>>>> On 26 Jun 1993 22:54:55 GMT, august@athena.mit.edu (Sue Raisty) said:

   Sue> I want to be able to send each message to the proper file right off
   Sue> instead of bringing it into my primary file and then sending it off to
   Sue> the right place.  That would require my being able to look at each
   Sue> message individually before it is brought into my directory.
   Sue> The movemail.c program that rmail-get-messages calls seems to put all
   Sue> the messages in the po-box together in a lump and transfers all of
   Sue> them at once.  I'd like to be able to transfer them one at a time,
   Sue> because among other things this will allow me to read some of my
   Sue> messages if I'm about to go over my memory quota, and will let me get
   Sue> the rest when I have more room in my account.

The place to do this is before the mail reader gets to it. You can use
any one of a number of different mail processors to do this; I use
procmail. Of course, this requires that you get your mail on a system
that recognizes .forward files; I get my mail forwarded from athena to a
private machine. This doesn't really help you, because:

   Sue> Does anyone know how I can do this?  (getting the messages one at a
   Sue> time instead of in a big lump?)  Does it involve changing the
   Sue> movemail.c program or something else.  I should mention that I am on a
   Sue> very distributed mail system that uses POP mail and remote
   Sue> post-offices.  Is there a program that will do this already that I am
   Sue> not aware of?  I don't really understand most of the movemail.c
   Sue> program that I can find here, probably because its been hacked a few
   Sue> times over for the athena system, and it doesn't have a comment in it.

I don't think there is a way to get mail off the pobox one at a time. I
would hope Athena's movemail would check to see if you have enough space
for the mail like (I think) inc does, but it probably doesn't.

As for getting your messages presorted into folders, you might try to
see what VM does, but I think it does pretty much what your functions
do.


--
Jin Choi
jsc@athena.mit.edu