Re: [h-e-w] Downloading mail.

[Jason Rumney]

G Anna <address@hidden> writes:

> After that when I came back and looked at the Gnus, to my horror I
> found that no new mails are there!  Which means I have lost all the
> 100 mails.

Is there a file "~/.emacs-mail-crash-box" in your HOME directory?
Usually Gnus temporarily stores mail it has downloaded there until it
finishes downloading, then does all the deleting from the POP server
and spooling into mail folders in one pass, for efficiency. But if
something goes wrong, it should read that file next time you start
Gnus.

> Now I don't understand why Gnus doesn't download the mail one at a
> time.  Why doesn't it download one mail, delete it from pop3 account,
> then download next and so on?

I can only guess that it is either for safety (it is better to get
two copies of some mail when things go wrong than none at all), or
efficiency (maybe it is more efficient to batch POP3 deletes).

> Or is there any other tool that has this property?

I use fetchmail and sendmail, configured to work offline, but not on
Windows. I have seen reports that fetchmail compiled with Cygwin
works, but I'm not sure about sendmail (but that is only needed for
sending). This frees up Emacs while the mail is downloading (Gnus only
has to get it from localhost, so it is fast), and allows me to send
and read mail while offline, which was a big bonus when I was paying
for my internet connection by the minute.


-- 
Jason Rumney