🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9203041537.AA15068@wendy-fate.UU.NET> kyle@wendy-fate.uu.net writes:
>Rich Kaul writes:
> > I have found that it's easier to use a separate directory for the
> > incoming mailboxes so I know when I have new mail in the various
> > catagories I use for mail.
>
>I agree with this strategy.  VM does not do any locking on mail
>folders so it is imperative that they not be used as spool files,
>i.e.  don't do asynchronous mail deliveries to folders.

I'd *really*, Really like to see this addressed in a nice general way.

The reason I switched to vm (from pcmail) was the fact that it could
use normal Unix style folders.  (Pcmail used babyl-format.)  At the
time, I was subscribed to a number of high-volume mailing lists, and I
was sick and tired of having xbiff beep all day long.  Of course,
since then, I've learned to like vm for lots of other reasons... :-)

So I used 'slocal' (part of 'mh') to filter incoming mail
automatically and put it in the appropriate folders for me.  Now xbiff
is useful again, and only my personal mail gets my immediate
attention; I deal with mailing-lists as if they're newsgroups, reading
them only when I have time.

Of course, I'm being *bad* (or perhaps, more accurately, stupid! :-).
My mail filter appends mail directly to the vm folders in my ~/Mail
directory.  Some day, this will probably bite me, if mail arrives
precisely when I'm saving a folder.  But for me, for the moment, the
risk is worth it.

What do you think of the following idea?

   Define a new variable (vm-aux-spool-directory?) which would be a
   directory to look in for spool files corresponding to any folder
   which is visited.

For example, suppose I were to visit folder "some-mailing-list", in my
"~/Mail" directory, and vm-aux-spool-directory was set to
"~/Mail/spool".  Then vm would automatically look for a
"~/Mail/spool/some-mailing-list" spool file, and incorporate any new
messages into the folder residing in "~/Mail".

It seems to me that this would satisfy a common need in a good way.  I
*don't* want to have to define special elisp functions to visit each
mailing list folder, and set the vm-spool-files variable appropriately
for each list.  That just doesn't seem like a clean, general solution
to me.

Well, any feedback on the above idea?  It doesn't seem that it would
be terribly difficult to implement, and I would be *immensely*
grateful...  (Notice how I avoided volunteering... :-)

Jon
-- 
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Jon Cargille		jcargill@cs.wisc.edu
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