2007-06-23 Gmail Fetch Problems

I use Gmail for my private emails. Google’s spam filter was the easiest to use (no setup required) and worked the best. You can also fetch mail from other accounts using POP3. This feature doesn’t really work for me. Every month or so I discover that my Emails are not being fetched. What is going on?

=> Gmail

Looking at Gmail → Settings → Accounts → View history:

||Sat, Jun 23, 2007 at 7:37 PM||200 mails fetched. 2357 mails remaining.|| ||:--:||:--:|| ||Sat, Jun 9, 2007 at 10:26 AM||No mails fetched.|| ||Sat, Jun 9, 2007 at 10:17 AM||2 mails fetched.|| ||Sat, Jun 9, 2007 at 10:12 AM||One mail fetched.|| ||Sat, Jun 9, 2007 at 10:07 AM||2 mails fetched.||

This is useless.

So I contacted ThomasWaldmann who runs thinkmo.de which hosts emacswiki.org, and asked for advice.

We had the following LDAP entry:

dn: mail=alex@emacswiki.org,ou=Mail,dc=thinkmo,dc=de
objectClass: mailAccount
objectClass: mail
mail: alex@emacswiki.org
gidNumber: 20008
uidNumber: 20008
mailDirectory: /srv/org.emacswiki/mail/alex/
homeDirectory: /srv/org.emacswiki/mail/alex/

We replaced it with the following:

dn: mail=alex@emacswiki.org,ou=Mail,dc=thinkmo,dc=de
objectClass: mailAlias
objectClass: mail
mail: alex@emacswiki.org
mailDrop: alex@gnu.org

I then got a 10MB tarball of /srv/org.emacswiki/mail/alex/ including a directory call ’cur’ containing what looks to be one file per Email. What would be the easiest way to read them? I’d love to import them into ThunderBird and use my existing spam-filters on them.

Well, first things first. I knew that the subject line of these mails contained the string ***SPAM*** so I unpacked the tarball, changed into the directory with all the files and ran this little command:

for f in `grep -lF "***SPAM***" *`; do rm "$f"; done

That reduced the number of candidates to 161. 😄

I tried using Emacs! I knew that Gnus could read and write Email in various formats. So here we go. Start Emacs. Run `M-x gnus`. Answer ’y’ to `Unable to open nntp:news, go offline? (y or n)` and answer ’y’ to `nntp (news) open error: ''. Continue? (y or n)` – I don’t care about news right now.

=> Emacs Emacs
=> http://quimby.gnus.org/gnus/ Gnus

I must have some Gnus data lying around. My `*Group*` buffer listed two groups: `SPAM` and `BACKUP`. I have no idea. 😄 The last messages are from 2006-05-17. I guess I don’t need them anymore. Use ’c’ to “catch up”.

=> 2006-05-17 2006-05-17

Now, I need to create a group that uses my directory as a source... `gnus-group-make-directory-group` looks like a good candidate: “The user will be prompted for a directory. The contents of this directory will be used as a newsgroup. The directory should contain mail messages or news articles in files that have numeric names.”

Damn the numeric names! 😄

I get `Group nndir:/Users/alex/Documents/Mail/alex/cur contains no messages`.

I wrote a little script called `number-files`:

!/bin/sh

NUM=1

for f in "$@"; do

echo mv "$f" $NUM

(( NUM++ ))

done