19. Mail; VM; GNUS; BBDB; and related

19.1. How and where I am suppose to set the face attributes for customizing the appearance of messages (i.e. for VM)?

Suppose you want to use:

(set-face-font 'message-highlighted-header-contents
               "-adobe-courier-bold-r-normal--12*")
(set-face-foreground 'message-headers "darkslateblue")
(set-face-foreground 'message-header-contents "brown")
(set-face-foreground 'message-highlighted-header-contents "black")
(set-face-foreground 'message-cited-text "darkgreen")

Well, this should work, provided that (require 'highlight-headers) is executed first. Also, highlight-headers is self-contained and you don't need to turn on font-lock mode.

19.2. I seem to have heard that there's a package distributed with XEmacs which will use the echo area to notify you of incoming mail in a rather configurable way (multiple spool files, different actions for different files). What and where is

it?

It's called reportmail. Add the following to your `.emacs':

(load-library "reportmail")

19.3. Is there any way to add more faces and regexps to GNUS without hacking gnus.el?

You can try the folowing elisp:

(add-hook 'gnus-startup-hook
          '(lambda ()
              (font-lock-mode)
              (set-face-foreground 'message-headers "red")
              (set-face-foreground 'message-header-contents "orange")
              (set-face-foreground 'message-cited-text "blue")))

19.4. What is BBDB?

BBDB is the Big Brother Database, written by Jamie Zawinski <jwz@netscape.com>. It interfaces to VM, mh-e, and GNUS and conveniently snarfs information about people and other things from articles and messages that go by.

BBDB is available from the elisp archive

BBDB has a mailing list devoted to it:

info-bbdb@cs.uiuc.edu

This mailing list is archived at

19.5. I noticed that BBDB evokes an XEmacs bug; is there a fix?

This worked for me:

(setq bbdb-electric-p nil)

19.6. I'm getting the error 'Wrong type argument: listp :-pos' when I try to start BBDB. What do I do?

Discard the copy of mail-extr.el that came with bbdb.

XEmacs 19.12 made the change that you cannot change the value of interned symbols whose names begin with a colon. The mail-extr.el that's distributed with 19.12+ is fixed to live with this restriction, but old copies of mail-extr.el will bomb.

19.7. I'm getting the error 'movemail: Permission denied' when I try and start VM. What do I do?

Execute the following two commands. movemail is normally located in the XEmacs install tree at `.../lib/xemacs-19.13/${arch}/movemail'.

        chgrp mail movemail
        chmod 2555 movemail

19.8. How can I get URLs sent to Netscape for VM and GNUS?

First, consider:

(setq highlight-headers-follow-url-function
	   'highlight-headers-follow-url-netscape)

For VM, you have three choices. For the first, from within VM, click button3 and select netscape from menu or say :

   (setq vm-url-browser "netscape")

and click button2 on the URL.

For the second, a better choice is:

	(setq vm-url-browser 'vm-mouse-send-url-to-netscape)

If you set vm-url-browser to "netscape", it will launch a new version of netscape every time, but the two functions will direct an existing version of netscape to the new url, unless you aren't running netscape, in which case it will launch one.

For GNUS (at least for 5.0, though might work on 4.x.x):

(setq gnus-button-url 'gnus-netscape-open-url)

19.9. What can be done about this "integer constant overflow" error GNUS gives when reading newsgroups?

It is usually caused by too many headers in a news group. Look at the buffer *nntp* and do a search in that buffer for the integer that caused the overflow. When you find a match, put:

(setq gnus-ignored-newsgroups "newsgroup.you.found")

in your .emacs file.