Reading old news

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

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