Reading old news

Reading old news

[Yuri D'Elia]

Hi everyone. I'm using Gnus to read my mail from several IMAP accounts
and I whenever I need to look back into my mail archives I feel like I'm
not using Gnus optimally.

Let's say I'm looking for some old email a colleague sent me last
week. My first approach would be:

- nnir with the colleague's name, or possibly subject
- then limit to the last week with '/ t'
- look for the relevant email
- re-construct the thread with 'A T' (which doesn't seem to work too well
  to me, the thread reconstruction is always partial and I need to
  repeat "A T" on the parent group - yes, gather-limit is already nil).

This looks too convoluted.

Can I get the last week worth of articles from a group directly? nnir on
large groups is slow if all I need is a search in the last ~500 articles.
Right now to do that I simply enter an existing group, enter a large
(but random) number of articles to read, then limit.

Another usage pattern that I would like to optimize: let's say I'm
looking for an old conversation I had last week, I want to see all
threads that have a particular author or subject. I can search with
nnir, or open the last week-or-so of messages, but then I want to
reconstruct *all* threads I've found automatically, so that I'm getting
the big picture. Since reconstructing all threads is bothersome, I
simply read a group with a very large number of articles to read, then
(ab)use limit. I feel like I would use an "enter group with an artibrary
article limit command" feature.

Any suggestion or alternative usage pattern greatly appreciated.

Bests

Re: Reading old news

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Yuri D'Elia <wavexx@users.sf.net>:

> Can I get the last week worth of articles from a group directly? nnir
> on large groups is slow if all I need is a search in the last ~500
> articles.  Right now to do that I simply enter an existing group,
> enter a large (but random) number of articles to read, then limit.

nnir speed is dependent on the search efficiency of the IMAP server, so
the best way to get a speedup would be to get improved indexing on the
server (if possible).

What IMAP server do you use?

If you're using dovecot I would personally be interested in any speedups
you could achieve (too lazy to do the research myself...;-) ).

Re: Reading old news

[Yuri D'Elia]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2011 12:50:42 +0100, Steinar Bang wrote:
>> Can I get the last week worth of articles from a group directly? nnir
>> on large groups is slow if all I need is a search in the last ~500
>> articles.  Right now to do that I simply enter an existing group,
>> enter a large (but random) number of articles to read, then limit.
>
> nnir speed is dependent on the search efficiency of the IMAP server, so
> the best way to get a speedup would be to get improved indexing on the
> server (if possible).
>
> What IMAP server do you use?
>
> If you're using dovecot I would personally be interested in any speedups
> you could achieve (too lazy to do the research myself...;-) ).

I'm using dovecor allright, though I'm not really interested in speeding
up nnir (which, by the way, is faster than sylpheed mail search anyway),
I'm looking for better ways to read an old group.

Re: Reading old news

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Yuri D'Elia <wavexx@users.sf.net> writes:

> Can I get the last week worth of articles from a group directly? nnir on
> large groups is slow if all I need is a search in the last ~500 articles.
> Right now to do that I simply enter an existing group, enter a large
> (but random) number of articles to read, then limit.

I think that's basically the only way to do this.  Gnus has to download
the headers to see how old the articles are, so there's not really much
room for improvement.  But, I mean, one could envision a command saying
"show me last week's articles", and Gnus would first download header N,
and see how old that article is, and then use binary searching (or
something) to find the right cutoff point.  But this would entail a lot
of ping-ponging with the server, so it would probably be somewhat slow.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Reading old news...

[Karl Asha]

Is there a way to, say, do the equivalent of 'r' in tin, with GNUS?

I would like to enter a buffer, which may have some ticked articles, and
be able to pull in all the old articles that I've already read through.

Cheers, 
Karl Asha
karl@ncm.com