Hello, I'm trying to set GNU's to read
email from a Maildir directory, spooled
from mbsync (isync). Mutt can read it well,
but GNU's can't.

(nnmaildir "local"
(directory "~/Mail/cur"))

I tried with "~/Mail" too, but I've got
the same 'luck', the content shows empty.

Ander GM <anthk@disroot.org> writes:

> Hello, I'm trying to set GNU's to read
> email from a Maildir directory, spooled
> from mbsync (isync). Mutt can read it well,
> but GNU's can't.
>
> (nnmaildir "local"
> (directory "~/Mail/cur"))
>
> I tried with "~/Mail" too, but I've got
> the same 'luck', the content shows empty.

Are the other directories ("new" and "tmp") present alongside "cur"?

--
Ben.

Ander GM <anthk@disroot.org> writes:

> Hello, I'm trying to set GNU's to read
> email from a Maildir directory, spooled
> from mbsync (isync). Mutt can read it well,
> but GNU's can't.
>
> (nnmaildir "local"
> (directory "~/Mail/cur"))
>
> I tried with "~/Mail" too, but I've got
> the same 'luck', the content shows empty.

I gave nnmaildir a try with this setup:

(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnmaildir "local"
(directory "~/Maildir")
)))

But this doesn't seem to find much. I got only three email folders and
those seem to be mistakes. I also use mutt and the way my mail folders
are under ~/Maildir, there are the usual cur, new and tmp dirs which are
my inbox. Maildir subdirectories have names starting with a dot, so for
example under ~/Maildir I have directories like .Sent and .spam and
..Trash. Gnus manual says outright it ignores all directories whose name
starts with a dot and it ignores my inbox too, apparently because it's
not in a subdirectory, it's directly under ~/Maildir.

So I could maybe get my inbox visible by creating a symlink inbox
pointing to . since a similar symlink spam pointing to .spam made my
spam folder visible to Gnus. Didn't really want to test this out with my
inbox since it's rather huge and opening the spam folder with a few
hundred spam messages already took a while. Also Gnus seems to abort
during startup if it gets any "stale file handle" complaints, my maildir
is mounted via NFS and those happen. Mutt doesn't seem to mind this.

So this naming convention for maildir that Gnus uses seems to be rather
different from what I use with mutt and procmail and in fact, my mail is
available also via IMAP so it's actually the mail server which does
mapping between IMAP folders and a maildir structure.

So to use Gnus here, I'd need to add a symlink to each folder I have and
and also make Gnus a little tolerant of these NFS stale file handle
things. So I think I'll stick with what I have, mutt and procmail and
bogofilter on the shell level, Thunderbird, kmail, FairEmail for IMAP
access.

On 2024-04-17, Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> wrote:
> Ander GM <anthk@disroot.org> writes:
>
>> Hello, I'm trying to set GNU's to read
>> email from a Maildir directory, spooled
>> from mbsync (isync). Mutt can read it well,
>> but GNU's can't.
>>
>> (nnmaildir "local"
>> (directory "~/Mail/cur"))
>>
>> I tried with "~/Mail" too, but I've got
>> the same 'luck', the content shows empty.
>
> Are the other directories ("new" and "tmp") present alongside "cur"?
>

Yes.

Ander GM <anthk@disroot.org> writes:

> Hello, I'm trying to set GNU's to read
> email from a Maildir directory, spooled
> from mbsync (isync). Mutt can read it well,
> but GNU's can't.
>
> (nnmaildir "local"
> (directory "~/Mail/cur"))
>
> I tried with "~/Mail" too, but I've got
> the same 'luck', the content shows empty.

I've had the same experience when I tried to use Maildir with Gnus. I
then settled for downloading mail using POP3 and letting Gnus store it
however it wished. It gave me the feeling that the maildir support is
broken.

In the end I'm using maildir with rmail as it calls movemail by itself,
but it's really suboptimal.

Johanne Fairchild <jfairchild@tudado.org> writes:

> Ander GM <anthk@disroot.org> writes:
>
< > Hello, I'm trying to set GNU's to read
< > email from a Maildir directory, spooled
< > from mbsync (isync). Mutt can read it well,
< > but GNU's can't.
< >
< > (nnmaildir "local"
< > (directory "~/Mail/cur"))
< >
< > I tried with "~/Mail" too, but I've got
< > the same 'luck', the content shows empty.
>
> I've had the same experience when I tried to use Maildir with Gnus. I
> then settled for downloading mail using POP3 and letting Gnus store it
> however it wished. It gave me the feeling that the maildir support is
> broken.

Have you tried compiling emacs using --with-mailutils ?

steve <sgonedes1977@gmail.com> writes:

> Johanne Fairchild <jfairchild@tudado.org> writes:
>
>> Ander GM <anthk@disroot.org> writes:
>>
> < > Hello, I'm trying to set GNU's to read
> < > email from a Maildir directory, spooled
> < > from mbsync (isync). Mutt can read it well,
> < > but GNU's can't.
> < >
> < > (nnmaildir "local"
> < > (directory "~/Mail/cur"))
> < >
> < > I tried with "~/Mail" too, but I've got
> < > the same 'luck', the content shows empty.
>>
>> I've had the same experience when I tried to use Maildir with Gnus. I
>> then settled for downloading mail using POP3 and letting Gnus store it
>> however it wished. It gave me the feeling that the maildir support is
>> broken.
>
>
> Have you tried compiling emacs using --with-mailutils ?

Thanks for the suggestion. I have no tried that. I'm running it on
Windows. It would not be a five-minute operation to compile it on
Windows to try this out, but I would look into it if you motivate the
idea better. Why would Maildir support work if we compile it with
--with-mailutils? Why does the GNU EMACS allow us to try Maildir
support if it was somehow not compiled to be able to?

Ander GM <anthk@disroot.org> writes:

> Hello, I'm trying to set GNU's to read
> email from a Maildir directory, spooled
> from mbsync (isync). Mutt can read it well,
> but GNU's can't.
>
> (nnmaildir "local"
> (directory "~/Mail/cur"))
>
> I tried with "~/Mail" too, but I've got
> the same 'luck', the content shows empty.

The target for nnmaildir should be ~/Mail (or whichever dir contains the
new/ cur/ tmp/). The cur/ of a Maildir is not the Maildir.