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nnmaildir
stores mail in the maildir format, with each maildir
corresponding to a group in Gnus. This format is documented here:
http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html and here:
http://www.qmail.org/man/man5/maildir.html. nnmaildir also
stores extra information in the `.nnmaildir/' directory within a
maildir.
Maildir format was designed to allow concurrent deliveries and reading, without needing locks. With other back ends, you would have your mail delivered to a spool of some kind, and then you would configure Gnus to split mail from that spool into your groups. You can still do that with nnmaildir, but the more common configuration is to have your mail delivered directly to the maildirs that appear as group in Gnus.
nnmaildir is designed to be perfectly reliable: C-g will never
corrupt its data in memory, and SIGKILL
will never corrupt its
data in the filesystem.
nnmaildir stores article marks and NOV data in each maildir. So you can copy a whole maildir from one Gnus setup to another, and you will keep your marks.
Virtual server settings:
directory
The value of the directory
parameter should be a Lisp form
which is processed by eval
and expand-file-name
to get
the path of the directory for this server. The form is eval
ed
only when the server is opened; the resulting string is used until the
server is closed. (If you don't know about forms and eval
,
don't worry--a simple string will work.) This parameter is not
optional; you must specify it. I don't recommend using
"~/Mail"
or a subdirectory of it; several other parts of Gnus
use that directory by default for various things, and may get confused
if nnmaildir uses it too. "~/.nnmaildir"
is a typical value.
target-prefix
eval
and
expand-file-name
. The form is eval
ed only when the
server is opened; the resulting string is used until the server is
closed.
When you create a group on an nnmaildir server, the maildir is created
with target-prefix
prepended to its name, and a symlink
pointing to that maildir is created, named with the plain group name.
So if directory
is "~/.nnmaildir"
and
target-prefix
is "../maildirs/"
, then when you create
the group foo
, nnmaildir will create
`~/.nnmaildir/../maildirs/foo' as a maildir, and will create
`~/.nnmaildir/foo' as a symlink pointing to
`../maildirs/foo'.
You can set target-prefix
to a string without any slashes to
create both maildirs and symlinks in the same directory
; in
this case, any maildirs found in directory
whose names start
with target-prefix
will not be listed as groups (but the
symlinks pointing to them will be).
As a special case, if target-prefix
is ""
(the default),
then when you create a group, the maildir will be created in
directory
without a corresponding symlink. Beware that you
cannot use gnus-group-delete-group
on such groups without the
force
argument.
directory-files
directory-files
(such as directory-files
itself). It is
used to scan the server's directory
for maildirs. This
parameter is optional; the default is
nnheader-directory-files-safe
if
nnheader-directory-files-is-safe
is nil
, and
directory-files
otherwise.
(nnheader-directory-files-is-safe
is checked only once when the
server is opened; if you want to check it each time the directory is
scanned, you'll have to provide your own function that does that.)
get-new-mail
nil
, then after scanning for new mail in the group
maildirs themselves as usual, this server will also incorporate mail
the conventional Gnus way, from mail-sources
according to
nnmail-split-methods
or nnmail-split-fancy
. The default
value is nil
.
Do not use the same maildir both in mail-sources
and as
an nnmaildir group. The results might happen to be useful, but that
would be by chance, not by design, and the results might be different
in the future. If your split rules create new groups, remember to
supply a create-directory
server parameter.
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