Re: request for ideas: organizing old email in gnus?

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Bill White <billw@wolfram.com> writes:
>
>> For example, would you respool into groups containing thousands of
>> emails, or into smaller monthly or yearly groups, such as ding-1998-03
>> for ding messages from March 1998?  I'm leaning toward the latter
>> since summary generation would be faster in case I needed to browse
>> the group, but threading might get messy/b0rken.
>
> If you choose large enough chunks (eg, yearly rather than monthly),
> then you could manually make sure to copy whole threads.

I've tinkered a lot with this sort of stuff.  Depending on size I
think you will find that above 2-3 thousand messages is a pain to deal
with due to summary generation or any other process that works against
the whole group or most of it.  All those cool features are nice but
they do cost something in process time.  Maybe you could cancel some
of the more expensive ones in Group param or gnus-parameters.  I've
never tried that.

I haven't done this either but you might consider breaking it up on a
size basis rather than date.  Confining each group to 2000 or less,
would gaurentee easy manipulation.

I would go for monthly chunks (again, depending on size) which could be
organized under topics too I guess, but I was never to thrilled with
topics.

You will break more threads with monthly chunks but I think it is
unavoidable and the `^' command will still chase down a reference
(assuming nnml).

An nnir search would still find subject line regardless of group if
you give it an (groups) inclusive command.

In brief:  If you expect to do browsing as in a regular group then go
for the smaller size.  `A T' won't retrieve a full thread if it is
broken but `^' will.

If you expect to mainly pull out info with search engines then large
size may be better.

Not sure what `A T' might do under a topic but where the the actual
messages are in two difffernet groups but under the same topic.