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:
nndiary to retrieve new mail by itself. Put the following
line in your ~/.gnus.el file:
(setq nndiary-get-new-mail t)
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:
This is the diary-specific replacement for the standard
mail-sources variable. It obeys the same syntax, and defaults to
(file :path "~/.nndiary").
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.