miscellaneous Gnus questions

[jbw@cs.bu.edu (Joe Wells)]

Hi, folks,

Here are some miscellaneous Gnus questions:

1. What keys/command do I use to re-scan all groups from a particular
   server?  (For example, I want to rescan all of my nnml groups without
   rescanning any nntp or nndir groups.)  I know there are commands to (1)
   re-scan all groups on a particular level and (2) re-scan a particular
   group (does this ever affect other groups?), but that is not what I
   want.

2. What is the difference between gnus-subscribe-alphabetically and
   gnus-subscribe-hierarchically?  I have read the documentation and
   looked at the source code yet clarity eludes me.

3. How do I arrange for articles to be marked as expirable from a score
   file without affecting the treatment of articles by ordinary reading?

4. How do I arrange for score-file changes to be specified by a score
   file?  What I want to do is completely wipe out all trace of the
   existence of a particular person.  So not only do I want to kill all of
   his articles, but I want to kill any followups to his articles, to the
   nth generation.  The way I envision this happening is that a score file
   entry would match the "from" field for this person and then add a new
   SCORE file entry for the "message-id" field of the current article.

   But the only action a score file entry that matches on the "from" field
   can take is to raise or lower the score of the current article.

5. For mail groups, the "%R" format spec for gnus-group-line-format counts
   all messages that have ever existed in the group, including those which
   have been destroyed by the "B DEL" command.  The information it uses
   seems to come from the active file.  Is there some way to get an
   accurate count of the *existing* read messages from the "%R" format
   spec?

6. In the summary buffer, what is difference between "M P b" and "M P a"?
   They seem to do the same thing and the documentation strings (from "C-h
   k") are not enlightening.

-- 
Joe Wells <jbw@cs.bu.edu>