Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!columbia!cs!popovich From: popovich@gollum.cs.columbia.edu (Steve Popovich) Newsgroups: comp.emacs Subject: Re: RMAIL file ---> UNIX mail file Message-ID: Date: 7 Feb 89 02:49:11 GMT References: <156@ai.cs.utexas.edu> <421@talos.UUCP> Sender: news@cs.columbia.edu Distribution: usa Organization: Columbia University Lines: 16 In-reply-to: kjones@talos.UUCP's message of 6 Feb 89 13:40:25 GMT Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.38.0 of Sun Mar 8 1987 on gollum (berkeley-unix) I also had a run-in with this once, when I finally decided to change over to RMAIL after my mbox got TOO too big to handle. (Actually what I probably want is more like mh-e, but mh isn't working here.) I started it up on my new mail, and SURPRISE -- the default isn't just to suck in NEW mail, it wants to grab my OLD mail as well! Crunch, crunch, grind, grind... (grovel through THOUSANDS of messages)...URK! Out of memory...(for those of you who don't remember the original Emacs. :-) Thought I'd lost my new mail for sure after that, but eventually found the .newmail file it left hanging around... I don't think rmail needs to be a disabled command, but I do think that having "mbox" as one of its default inputs is a little excessive. If somebody WANTS to convert all of their old mail, they certainly can -- but why check for it every time? Most of all, why give The Big Gotcha to first-time users? Mail, MM, MH...none of them convert all of your old messages to their format by default. Why should RMAIL?