Gnus attachment downloading blocks other Emacs interaction (was: w3 under development or not?)

[Ted Zlatanov]

On 14 Nov 2003, test1dellboy3@yahoo.co.uk wrote:

> I know this is slightly off-topic, but I have the same problem when
> I download my email under GNUs. It hangs for a long time while 50 of
> the latest "Microsoft Internet Security patches" or other crap are
> retrieved. During this wait, I would prefer to be working in a
> another Emacs window, but Emacs won't accept any input.
> 
> As suggested, is it a "design feature" of Emacs rather than
> configuration problem?

I would suggest the gnu.emacs.gnus newsgroup for this discussion.
Followup-To set appropriately.

You can do two things (there may be other solutions, this is what I
would do), separately or in combination:

- use IMAP, which does not require you to download the whole message

- use the Gnus spam.el package or a procmail-style filter to
  eliminate junk mail

In addition, if you request the feature (asynchronous article
downloading) in the Gnus newsgroup, maybe someone will write it.

While Emacs itself is single-threaded, it can handle concurrent
("asynchronous") processes - see the start-process function,
for instance.  Gnus can take advantage of that, I think, and the
possibility has been discussed before.

Ted