[gentoo-user] simple POP mail with Gmail?

["Alan E. Davis" <lngndvs@gmail.com>]

I have been beating my head against some email issues  for a long
time, so it's time to cry "Uncle!"

I have been able to download my POP mail via fetchmail, but every time
I download, the download limit has been about 1MB.  I would like to
have a local copy of all of my mail, an archive, and I want to compose
my mail off-line.  I would like to have an MTA set u], like I used to
, to send all my email in a batch when I connect.

I like MH alot.  I like Sylpheed / Sylpheed-claws, VM and some other
GUI apps that work over the top of MH.  I have several hard
drives/partitions with historical archives of email in mh format from
long ago.

I tried to follow a couple of howtos, and got lost in a miasma of
encryption/authorization configuration issues that will probably lead
to other problems later on.  I'd like to do this in the simplest, most
direct way possible---although I would not mind a bit of security, I
don't want to get lost along the way.

Some questions:

  1.  Can I use fetchmail to fetch only the latest 1000 (or so) emails
from gmail?  I'd like to have an archive, up to date, for all email,
but I have several machines.  I have used a POP "client" in the past
that I could do this, but cannot find such parameters for fetchmail.
So far, every time I try to run fetchmail, or Sylpheed/Sylpheed-claws,
the same thing happens---the downloads start from the earliest files
on gmail's server, and only will download 1MB.  In the numerous times
I have started this, I haven't been able to reach anything near
current.  Are the files on the server marked somehow, or can I cause
them to be marked so I don't grab them again (say, on another machine,
but by me)?
  2.  How to incorporate all of the various Mail archives into a
single, up to date one, to enable weeding and sorting all of those
files from times gone by.
  3.  SMTP issues: is it even reasonable to ask for help to render a
simple setup to use gmail as an smtp server?  I had it working two
years ago, or so, but it doesn't want to work anymore.  For me.  So
far.

I'd be happy to use sylpheed as a temporary gui email "client" with
the ability to use fetchmail to do daily updates.  GNUS is a
possibility: I like GNUS, and I suppose it's reasonable to run a
separate emacs process to run GNUS.  I want to avoid evolution, as
slick as it is, or thunderbird.

I apologize that this seems a very complicated bunch of questions.
Email has always seemed complicated to me, though.

Alan

-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  lngndvs@gmail.com     1-670-256-2043

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I
must share it with other people who like it.
                                          --------Richard Stallman
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