rmail

[h.peter.friedrich]

hello,
I use rmail with the above email-address, but I want to leave this
provider.
My favorite possible new provider uses the email-address as loginname.
But rmail cannot handle the "@ " inside the name.
I found in the emacswiki that this is a known problem.
Is it solved in the meantime and how can I solve it ?
greetings from Europe.
peter

[Robert Thorpe]

This is how I do it:
* Fix your email address.
In rmail-primary-inbox-list specify your email address replacing @ with
%40 like this: you%40server.com.

* Use Mailutils Movemail.
It's usually available from a package manager. I don't know if this is
necessary, but it's how I did it.

* Copy.
Copy the function rmail-insert-inbox-text from rmail.el. After you've
fixed it save off this new version of rmail-insert-inbox-text and load
it in your init file.

* Find the bit that says:
;; At this point, TOFILE contains the name to read:
;; Either the alternate name (if we renamed)
;; or the actual inbox (if not renaming).

* Add the fix.
After the comment put in the line:
(setq tofile (url-unhex-string tofile))
The line after that should be (if (file-exists-p tofile).


Here's why that works.... Movemail's command-line has the server
address after the email address. It's like this "movemail
y...@imap.server.com". So, if your email address has an @ in it then it
becomes "movemail y...@server.com@imap.server.com" which is nonsense.
The movemail people are aware of this problem, so they support using URL
encoding in addresses. So, you can use %40 instead of @ for the first
one, just like in a URL. Emacs doesn't know about any of this. The
problem is that they decode it when creating the mbox filename. So,
Emacs is expecting an mbox file called you%40server.com but it gets one
called y...@server.com. The line of code added removes that confusion.

When I get the time I'll contribute it to Emacs. I don't think it's the
right way to totally fix the problem though.

BR,
Robert Thorpe

[h.peter.friedrich]

hi robert,

thank you so much for your detailed answer.
In the meantime I use claws-mail.
But I will give your hints a try as soon as possible though I never
learned programming but managed to find out some issues in the past.

With greetings from Germany.

Peter