Re: adaptive expiry? feature request?

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

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

> What I would like is to have an expiry policy that is adaptive, in the
> same way as scoring is.  In fact, I would love to have an expiry time
> that is a function of the score (meaning that active threads, for
> instance, would not expire for quite a long time) and I guess other
> message attributes.  In other words, a more general version of the
> nnmail-expiry-wait-function and nnmail-fancy-expiry-targets functions
> would be quite nice to have!
>
> Is such a thing possible?  I've searched gnus variables and done a web
> search of sorts but found nothing.  I think it should be possible (maybe
> even straightforward?) to implement but my elisp is not good enough to
> even think about doing this.

I don't think there's anything in Gnus for doing that fine-grained
expiry, unfortunately.

If you look at (for instance) `nnml-request-expire-articles' (or
whatever mail backend you use), `nnmail-expired-article-p' is called to
determine whether an article is "old".  You'd have to wrap that call
with something that sets nnmail-expiry-wait with something that depends
on the score of the article.

> Footnotes: 
> [1]  does any other MUA have scoring?  Not that I intend to change :-)
> Just curious.

At the time Gnus introduced scoring (1993?) there were definitely a lot
of discussion about how to deal with the amazingly huge information
overload from Usenet.  >"?  So I don't think the scoring idea was
original to Gnus.  I think we developed the adaptive scoring thing at
Gnus, though.

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