Document Groups - Gnus Manual

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6.6.3 Document Groups

nndoc is a cute little thing that will let you read a single file as a newsgroup. Several files types are supported:

babyl: The Babyl format.
mbox: The standard Unix mbox file.
mmdf: The MMDF mail box format.
news: Several news articles appended into a file.
rnews: The rnews batch transport format.
nsmail: Netscape mail boxes.
mime-parts: MIME multipart messages.
standard-digest: The standard (RFC 1153) digest format.
mime-digest: A MIME digest of messages.
lanl-gov-announce: Announcement messages from LANL Gov Announce.
git: git commit messages.
rfc822-forward: A message forwarded according to RFC822.
outlook: The Outlook mail box.
oe-dbx: The Outlook Express dbx mail box.
exim-bounce: A bounce message from the Exim MTA.
forward: A message forwarded according to informal rules.
rfc934: An RFC934-forwarded message.
mailman: A mailman digest.
clari-briefs: A digest of Clarinet brief news items.
slack-digest: Non-standard digest format—matches most things, but does it badly.
mail-in-mail: The last resort.

You can also use the special “file type” guess, which means that nndoc will try to guess what file type it is looking at. digest means that nndoc should guess what digest type the file is.

nndoc will not try to change the file or insert any extra headers into it—it will simply, like, let you use the file as the basis for a group. And that's it.

If you have some old archived articles that you want to insert into your new & spiffy Gnus mail back end, nndoc can probably help you with that. Say you have an old RMAIL file with mail that you now want to split into your new nnml groups. You look at that file using nndoc (using the G f command in the group buffer (see Foreign Groups)), set the process mark on all the articles in the buffer (M P b, for instance), and then re-spool (B r) using nnml. If all goes well, all the mail in the RMAIL file is now also stored in lots of nnml directories, and you can delete that pesky RMAIL file. If you have the guts!

Virtual server variables:

nndoc-article-type: This should be one of mbox, babyl, digest, news, rnews, mmdf, forward, rfc934, rfc822-forward, mime-parts, standard-digest, slack-digest, clari-briefs, nsmail, outlook, oe-dbx, mailman, and mail-in-mail or guess.
nndoc-post-type: This variable says whether Gnus is to consider the group a news group or a mail group. There are two valid values: mail (the default) and news.