Re: some mail annoyances

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:

> * Ken McGlothlen <mcglk@serv.net>  on Fri, 25 Jun 1999
> | That's an excellent idea; I wonder why that isn't the default.
> 
> Because for most of us, manually marking articles expirable is the less-
> common pastime.  We follow the newsreaderly approach to reading mail, that
> messages marked as read will be expunged automatically as if we were
> reading from a news server unless we explicitly say otherwise (tick).

Just my own habits, but I find myself wanting to keep more than half
of my mail so ticking would be more time consuming than marking the
ones I don't  want with "E".  But I'll admit I am a little leary of
either auto or total expire.  Heres why:

More than once I've had the experience of loosing lots of saved
messages when using "total expire".  If for one reason or another a
group gets all articles marked as unread (M-c) and you do a catchup to
get back to something more reasonable, with out taking into account
the repercussions, then all ticked or dormant articles (now unticked
and undormanted) that are older than expiry-days are history.

If I stick to defaults and expunge by hand, and something occurs to
mark a group as unread, erasing marks, then nothing is lost to expiry,
when catching up.  

In any event, pretending that reading mail is the same as reading news
has to stop at the fact that no amount of ticking will save an nntp
article from expiry. Hence the persistent mark, so why continue to act
as if mail and news are the same.  Several posters have pointed out
that persistent marks in nnml or "mail" groups makes no sense.  Why?
Because it is not a newsgroup, nor is it news.  It is not handled by
gnus as if it were news either.

Nntp posts will be expunged (expired) regardless of your marks, even
unread. Gnus knows this.  Not so in mail, whatever your settings. Gnus
also knows this, and offers several ways to handle mail.  So while
there may be some confusion amongst gnus users about mail and news
being different, Gnus itself understands a fundamental difference.

Consequently gnus offers quite a wide variety of functions to deal
with the difference between news and mail.