Marking a whole imap-Folder as Expired

Marking a whole imap-Folder as Expired

[Sven Bretfeld]

Hi to all

Since I use my imap account not only with Gnus but also with K9
(Android) I have some problems with the expired-mark. As far as I can
see, non-Gnus clients cannot set an Email as expired, can they?

Therefore, I have several messages in my inboxes marked with "O" (old),
which excludes them from the expiry-process. Back in Gnus I have to
manually set them to expired with by hitting "E" one after the other. 

Is there a faster way to do this? 

Setting the folder to auto-expiry and hitting "C"
(gnus-summary-catchup-and-exit) does not work, because it affects only
new messages.

Thanks for a hint,

Sven

Re: Marking a whole imap-Folder as Expired

[Greg Troxel]

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"Sven Bretfeld" <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch> writes:

> Since I use my imap account not only with Gnus but also with K9
> (Android) I have some problems with the expired-mark. As far as I can
> see, non-Gnus clients cannot set an Email as expired, can they?
>
> Therefore, I have several messages in my inboxes marked with "O" (old),
> which excludes them from the expiry-process. Back in Gnus I have to
> manually set them to expired with by hitting "E" one after the other. 

Not what you asked, but I do this totally differently.

I use gnus as my main mail reader, and also thunderbird, osx/Mail.app,
and iphone/Mail.  While my mailinglist mail is like news, I consider my
INBOX to be not like news, and basically only want to explicitly delete
things.

So, I have all the non-gnus MUAs set up to delete by moving to
nnimap+[foo]:Trash (vs "Deleted Messages" with whitespace), and then

Then I bind 'd' to

(defun gdt-gnus-move-to-trash ()
  (interactive)
  (gnus-summary-move-article nil gdt-trash-newsgroup))

and delete messages when I'm done with them.

This works for me because I filter (before delivery, not with gnus)
messages that aren't more or less to me personally to one of about 100
other IMAP folders.  Most of those I both set auto-expire=t and read
only with gnus - basically they contain (by construction) data that does
not require timely processing.

This whole scheme is built around the notion that I want reading the
INBOX on my phone to be useful, which for me means that all mailinglist
mail (and anything that gets even 1 point with spamassassin) does not
go to INBOX.

I suppose you could write something that finds messages marked read but
not expirable in groups that are marked auto-expire.

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Re: Marking a whole imap-Folder as Expired

[Eric S Fraga]

"Sven Bretfeld" <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch> writes:

> Hi to all
>
> Since I use my imap account not only with Gnus but also with K9
> (Android) I have some problems with the expired-mark. As far as I can
> see, non-Gnus clients cannot set an Email as expired, can they?

I have this same problem but I am not sure it is caused by other mail
readers; in my case, I am getting convinced that it is the gnus agent
that is doing it as this happens in all my folders and yet I use k9 on
Android only to access my inbox.

> Therefore, I have several messages in my inboxes marked with "O" (old),
> which excludes them from the expiry-process. Back in Gnus I have to
> manually set them to expired with by hitting "E" one after the other. 
>
> Is there a faster way to do this? 

You can mark a region in your Summary buffer and then C-u C-w
(gnus-summary-mark-region-as-read) to mark all those messages as
expired.  The C-u is necessary as otherwise the messages are simply
marked read.

HTH,
eric

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D) in Emacs 24.0.50.1 + No Gnus v0.18

Re: Marking a whole imap-Folder as Expired

[Sven Bretfeld]

Hi Greg

Greg Troxel <gdt@work.lexort.com> writes:

> "Sven Bretfeld" <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch> writes:

>> Therefore, I have several messages in my inboxes marked with "O" (old),
>> which excludes them from the expiry-process. Back in Gnus I have to
>> manually set them to expired with by hitting "E" one after the other. 
>
> Not what you asked, but I do this totally differently.
>
> I use gnus as my main mail reader, and also thunderbird, osx/Mail.app,
> and iphone/Mail.  While my mailinglist mail is like news, I consider my
> INBOX to be not like news, and basically only want to explicitly delete
> things.
>
> So, I have all the non-gnus MUAs set up to delete by moving to
> nnimap+[foo]:Trash (vs "Deleted Messages" with whitespace), and then
>
> Then I bind 'd' to
>
> (defun gdt-gnus-move-to-trash ()
>   (interactive)
>   (gnus-summary-move-article nil gdt-trash-newsgroup))
>
> and delete messages when I'm done with them.

Its interesting to read how other people cope with the ideosyncratisms
of Gnus (compared to other mail readers). I do it differently. Since I'm
using Gnus I got used to treat emails like news, and I like to have them
out of sight after I have read them. Therefore it annoys me to see all
my old mails when I'm in K9. In Gnus I organize my mails in a GTD-style
structure. If it takes more than two minutes, I mark it unread and shift
it to a "processing" folder: Action, Waiting, Review, Urgent etc. This
workflow is interrupted in K9 where all my expired mails become visible
again. Therefore I have my inboxes (the workflow-folders as well as the
main inbox) set to auto-expire immediately with an "Expired" folder as
the expiry-target. Just to have expired mails out of sight for K9. The
"Expired" folder keeps mails for 14 days, this is the expected
time-frame where it is possible that I have to visit that mail again due
to follow-ups or reference purposes. After that they expire into a spool
folder where they are fetched by fetchmail (POP) (and deleted from the
server) to one of my local machines where they are stored in an
ever-growing archive.

> This whole scheme is built around the notion that I want reading the
> INBOX on my phone to be useful, which for me means that all mailinglist
> mail (and anything that gets even 1 point with spamassassin) does not
> go to INBOX.

I split mails similarly. The major INBOX is only for personal mail,
which is then manually "processed" into the work-flow folders.
Mailing-lists I don't access with my mobile or tablet. I only read them
with Gnus. If I like to read them en route I ssh into the PC. 

Greetings,

Sven

Re: Marking a whole imap-Folder as Expired

[Sven Bretfeld]

Hello Eric

Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> You can mark a region in your Summary buffer and then C-u C-w
> (gnus-summary-mark-region-as-read) to mark all those messages as
> expired.  The C-u is necessary as otherwise the messages are simply
> marked read.

Aah. I didn't know this one. Its exactly what I way looking for.  Thank
you very much. I didn't even know that you can work with regions in a
summary buffer. I always used # to define groups of mails. 

The documentation of Emacs is good, but (as the only person who has ever
heard of Gnus/Emacs in my whole circle of acquaintances) I feel that you
always need a concrete person to guide your attention and to show you
the tricks.

Greetings,

Sven

Re: Marking a whole imap-Folder as Expired

[Dan Christensen]

I wonder if there are enough users of both k9 and Gnus to make it
worthwhile adding support for the gnus-expire flag in k9?

Dan

Re: Marking a whole imap-Folder as Expired

[Eric S Fraga]

Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca> writes:

> I wonder if there are enough users of both k9 and Gnus to make it
> worthwhile adding support for the gnus-expire flag in k9?

+1

what do the k9 developers use on "big" computers?

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D) in Emacs 24.0.90.1 + No Gnus v0.18