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From: Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>
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Subject: How can I split old mail based on "Date:"?
Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2001 17:14:23 -0500
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I've got some truly gargantuan groups (like debian-user) that I'd like
to break up into sub-groups based on date, and I'm wondering what the
best way to do this is.

Ideally I'd like to be able to just write elisp (for this and other
purposes) to do the job.  Perhaps something like:

  (gnus-group-for-each-msg 'my-by-date-splitter)

where my-by-date-splitter might look like this:

  (defun my-by-date-splitter (group article)
    (let ((header-date (gnus-article-get-date article))
          ...)
      (gnus-group-move-article group new-group)))

or similar. [1]

gnus probably already has most of the code I'd need, but where should
I start looking (i.e. to find out how to map over all articles, how to
get the article date, etc.)

I'd be happy with an elisp function I could call from the *Group*
buffer, or better yet, a function that gets called automatically now
and then, or perhaps just a suitable expiry function that moves
articles older than say a year to group-yearnumber.

I suppose I could just edit my splits and respool, but I want to
preserve marks, and I'd rather not have to add a new rule every time I
want to do this.

Thanks

[1] I've occasionally thought it might be nice to have a general
    purpose elisp or scheme library for manipulating email, and it
    seems like if the backend format were well enough specified, this
    shouldn't be too hard from either language for simple tasks (like
    changing article marks, etc.).  i.e. in nnmaildir, it seems like
    some things would be really easy, given its fs layout...

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG=1C58 8B2C FB5E 3F64 EA5C  64AE 78FE E5FE F0CB A0AD