Re: expiring mail in Gnus

["David Z. Maze" <dmaze@mit.edu>]

Gary Hennigan <glhenni@sandia.gov> writes:
GH> 3) And I think this is your main problem. 
GH> 
GH> Once you read an article it generally has one of three "marks" next to
GH> it:
GH> 
GH> O means the article/mail was read, but is not marked as read.
GH> E means the article/mail was read and marked as expirable
GH> ! means the article is marked to be kept
GH> 
GH> You need to mark the articles as expirable as you read them. This
GH> means using the "E" key instead of the "d" when reading articles. This
GH> was annoying to me since I always want to expire articles/mail that I
GH> read and don't explicitly mark as keepable with the "!" key. So, what
GH> I did was redefine my "d" key to mark the article as expirable instead
GH> of just read:

Two things are worth noting:

(1) If total-expire is set for a group, then "read" is equivalent to
    "expirable".  This is the setup I use for groups like debian-*.

(2) If auto-expire is set for a group, then commands that normally
    mark an article as "read" mark it as "expirable" instead, thus
    obviating the need for the key redefinition you show below.

I believe auto-expire is somewhat faster when actually performing
expiry, but works poorly with adaptive scoring (because articles never 
get marked "read").

FWIW, my group parameters on mail.lists.debian.user are essentially
the same as those those mentioned earlier (I don't try to set an
expiry wait, but use the default).  Under XEmacs, I find it easier to
use Customize to edit group parameters (via "G c" from the group
buffer).

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://donut.mit.edu/dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell