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.