6.3.12 Not Reading Mail

If you start using any of the mail back ends, they have the annoying habit of assuming that you want to read mail with them. This might not be unreasonable, but it might not be what you want.

If you set mail-sources and nnmail-spool-file to nil, none of the back ends will ever attempt to read incoming mail, which should help.

This might be too much, if, for instance, you are reading mail quite happily with nnml and just want to peek at some old Rmail file you have stashed away with nnbabyl. All back ends have variables called back-end-get-new-mail. If you want to disable the nnbabyl mail reading, you edit the virtual server for the group to have a setting where nnbabyl-get-new-mail to nil.

All the mail back ends will call nn*-prepare-save-mail-hook narrowed to the article to be saved before saving it when reading incoming mail.