Gnus Manual: Running NNDiary

6.8.1.2 Running NNDiary

nndiary has two modes of operation: “traditional” (the default) and “autonomous”. In traditional mode, nndiary does not get new mail by itself. You have to move (B m) or copy (B c) mails from your primary mail back end to nndiary groups in order to handle them as diary messages. In autonomous mode, nndiary retrieves its own mail and handles it independently from your primary mail back end.

One should note that Gnus is not inherently designed to allow several “master” mail back ends at the same time. However, this does make sense with nndiary: you really want to send and receive diary messages to your diary groups directly. So, nndiary supports being sort of a “second primary mail back end” (to my knowledge, it is the only back end offering this feature). However, there is a limitation (which I hope to fix some day): respooling doesn’t work in autonomous mode.

In order to use nndiary in autonomous mode, you have several things to do:

Allow nndiary to retrieve new mail by itself. Put the following line in your ~/.gnus.el file:
```
(setq nndiary-get-new-mail t)
```
You must arrange for diary messages (those containing X-Diary-* headers) to be split in a private folder before Gnus treat them. Again, this is needed because Gnus cannot (yet ?) properly handle multiple primary mail back ends. Getting those messages from a separate source will compensate this misfeature to some extent.
As an example, here’s my procmailrc entry to store diary files in ~/.nndiary (the default nndiary mail source file):
```
:0 HD :
* ^X-Diary
.nndiary
```

Once this is done, you might want to customize the following two options that affect the diary mail retrieval and splitting processes:

Variable: nndiary-mail-sources: This is the diary-specific replacement for the standard mail-sources variable. It obeys the same syntax, and defaults to (file :path "~/.nndiary").

Variable: nndiary-split-methods: This is the diary-specific replacement for the standard nnmail-split-methods variable. It obeys the same syntax.

Finally, you may add a permanent nndiary virtual server (something like (nndiary "diary") should do) to your gnus-secondary-select-methods.

Hopefully, almost everything (see the TODO section in nndiary.el) will work as expected when you restart Gnus: in autonomous mode, typing g and M-g in the group buffer, will also get your new diary mails and split them according to your diary-specific rules, F will find your new diary groups etc.