alderson@portia.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) (09/12/89)
I'm having a little trouble with mail files in different formats. As I under-
stand it, rmail is (should be) able to read several different mail-file formats
and convert them to babyl-style. It also claims to write out both babyl- and
mbox- (unix-mail) style files on request.
Here's how I got into my present predicament. I use Gnews 2.0 to read news,
and when I started I wasn't yet keen on using rmail for other mail, so I used
(setq gnews-save-style 'gnews-output-to-mbox-file)
in my .emacs. This made gnews save articles in "UNIX mail format"--which it
did by calling the appropriate routine in the rmail package.
Now, when I wanted to turn to rmail as my primary mail reader (having convinced
myself that it's pretty much the same as Babyl under ITS or Tops-20), I decided
to convert all those save files from "mbox" to "babyl" format. That's the
problem: Any file saved in "mbox" format, with any number of messages, comes
into rmail as a single message.
Now, I've used Columbia's version of MM for UNIX on these files, and THAT has
no problem reading them as multiple messages. If I move them to another file
with MM, rmail mumbles over the resulting file for a LONG time, then comes up
empty.
What am I doing wrong? (NB: The answer to this question is neither "Use GNUS"
nor "Use VM"--I'd like to explore rmail for a while before I go on from there.)
Rich Alderson
alderson@{jessica,portia,polya}.stanford.edu (Unices)
a.alderson@{macbeth,hamlet}.stanford.edu (Twenices)