This page is a rant that documents my efforts in getting going with Gnus as an IMAP+SSL mail reader. It has been written in the hopes that no one will ever need to find all this stuff again.
The Gnus documentation encourages you to set gnus-secondary-select-methods if you want to set up an IMAP+SSL (imaps) connection. That would be great were the secondary select methods not so disruptive. Especially for sysadmins (like me), using secondary select methods is not feasible, because after a server has been entered in the list, Gnus will always try to connect to it upon startup, even if the user never subscribes and never will subscribe to any group from the server (say, most of our users only use Gnus for reading news).
Now, the `B' command (browse foreign server) would be the right solution, but surprise surprise, its `(interactive)' definition won't allow us to specify to use ssl in the connection. Which is pretty bad, because ssl is the only imap streaming method that Gnus refuses to auto-detect.
Of course, one solution (probably the neatest one) is to call gnus-group-browse-foreign-server noninteractively. I wish you good luck; here is a sample invocation:
M-: (gnus-group-browse-foreign-server
'(nnimap "mymail"
(nnimap-address "imap.mymail.com")
(nnimap-stream ssl)))
The good thing is, once you've browsed the list there and subscribed to even one folder (say, your inbox) (which is done with the command `u'=unsubscribe, now isn't that very intuitive), you can always get back there with `^' from the group buffer. Which is nice.
However, for those bad and stupid users that don't like to write multiple lines of elisp and to deal with their syntax mistakes, I dare offer this function which, in my opinion, should be included in the Gnus distribution unless they come up with some more general way to pass parameters to `B':
(defun gnus-browse-imaps-server (server)
"Browse a mail server in Gnus via IMAP-SSL."
(interactive "sServer name: ")
(gnus-group-browse-foreign-server
(list 'nnimap server
(list 'nnimap-address server)
'(nnimap-stream ssl)
'(nnimap-list-pattern ("INBOX" "mail/*" "Mail/*" "INBOX.*"))
'(nnimap-expunge-on-close ask))))
I didn't care to check whether elisp supports quasiquoting. Using that is left as an exercise to the reader.
Now, Gnus uses the OpenSSL command line program, openssl, to connect to the server by default. This is good and fine. If it doesn't work out of the box, you might want to try something like:
(setq imap-ssl-program "openssl s_client -tls1 -connect %s:%p")
You can also use stunnel to connect. For me, the magic incantation is:
(setq imap-ssl-program "/usr/sbin/stunnel -c -r %s:%p")
Now, here comes the best part. Gnus uses open-ssl-stream from ssl.el to connect (even though what it does is practically just run the program given by ssl-program-name) which is not delivered with all emacsen (at least, on my debian/stable system it isn't). Better yet, the call to open-ssl-stream is within (ignore-errors) for reasons unbeknownst to me, which causes the connection to fail mysteriously with the error messages "failed" and "Server denied". Yay!
It suffices to drop ssl.el into /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp. You can get ssl.el from here: http://quimby.gnus.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/gnus/contrib/ssl.el
As explained very well in the Gnus info document, Gnus makes mail reading very news-like. This, in my opinion, is the best part about using Gnus as a mail reader: at last, you have proper support for dealing with all those ****ing mailing lists.
The biggest question comes from deleting mail. You seldom delete news. What you can delete from news is your own postings, and that's called "canceling", works by sending a request for cancellation of the article throughout the usenet, and isn't particularly reliable. This is not something like deleting already-read mail from your inbox.
Actually, Gnus does have a concept of "Deleted", which is exactly what you'd expect it to mean for mail messages. And, Gnus has a concept of "Expirable", which means an article that Gnus thinks it has every right to delete after some time (a week) has passed. These are documented in different parts of the info document, neither of which is the same place where imap (or mail folders in general, for that matter) is discussed.
Now, as a result of this and Gnus' default behavior of now showing read articles, we actually have five (count it!) levels of "deletedness":
1. unread articles 2. read articles 3. expirable articles 4. expired (deleted) articles 5. articles that are actually deleted
The reason for this last category is that, imap servers do not delete articles directly, they require you to first flag them as deleted and then expunge them. Because Gnus already has this quite extensive expiry scheme, this imap behavior feels really really unnecessary.
The next problem is, if you can't see your read mail but it only gets deleted if marked for expiration, how will you ever get rid of mail that you read but forgot to mark for expiration? That is, how do you list your read messages? Most news readers have a "show unread / show all" toggle, so that should be the answer? Right? Right?
Wrong. It took me two hours to find this functionality from the documentation, and in the meanwhile, I saw at least one web page (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~smcpeak/gnus.html) which taught people to deal with Gnus but explicitly mentions that the author hasn't yet been able to find this functionality. This is because showing all articles is implemented as a flag to entering a group (even though the limiting system, i.e. gnus-summary-limit-to-unread provides the exact same functionality once we have all articles), and, in a very emacs-ish way, is available by giving a prefix argument to gnus-select-group. Woohoo!
This means that, to list all articles in the current mail folder, you leave it with `q' and re-select it with `C-u <RET>' or `C-u <SPC>'.
Oh, I just found this has its own key binding - yet in another place in the documentation. Go on, it's `C-u Z R'.
C-u Z R - show also read messages from the group
E - mark for expiry (think of this as "deleting")
B <DEL> - directly delete the article
B m - move a message into another folder
I would like to note, that the node "Mail Group Commands" is indispensable to you if you use Gnus as a mail reader.
kategoria: työkalut (category: tools)
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