Re: Concerning marks and the back end.

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com> writes:

> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
>
>> Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com> writes:
>>
>>> I'm talking about the case where all messages are already marked as
>>> read, and I want to enter the group.  If there is a several-thousand
>>> message backlog of already-read messages in that group, it takes a huge
>>> amount of time to construct the summary buffer.  For example, one such
>>> group has 5670 old messages as of this posting.
>>>
>>> Not fetching headers for most of this several-thousand message backlog
>>> would speed things up immensely.
>>
>> If you only ask for the, say, three last articles, you should only
>> get the article headers for (approx.) the last three articles.
>
> Well, I guess you're talking about my typing something like ...
>
>   <ESC> 5 0 <space>
>
> ... when pointing to the group in the Groups buffer to see only that
> last (approx.) 50 unread articles.  I had forgotten about that and it
> indeed works for me.  So for the time being, this is a big help.
>
> Nonetheless, I'm wondering if there's a way to mark articles in such a
> way that these marks are stored in the .marks file (instead of the back
> end), so that articles marked in this way will never be queried from the
> back end unless some special command is typed.
>
> It seems like that would be a nice feature.

Maybe you can use this approach to accomplish something similar: set
the group parameter "display" (G c) to a value that makes group
entering fast (e.g. 500).  If you ever want to see older articles,
enter the group with C-u SPC.  If you want to keep around a specific
article even after falls outside of the 500 limit, press ! on it.