Re: Marking new unread articles differently?

[Mike McEwan <mike@lotusland.demon.co.uk>]

Matt Simmons <simmonmt@acm.org> writes:

> I can't be the only one who has obscene numbers of unread messages
> rotting away in my mailbox.  This causes me to lose new messages,
> especially when the appear as part of a thread headed by previously
> unread messages.
> 
> Is there any way to have the messages that have appeared since the
> last time the spool was inc'd displayed in a different face in the
> Summary Buffer?  This would make it easier to differentiate between
> old and new unread messages.
> 
  I've been hacking a bit at the gnus source and now have all newly
  downloaded headers in all my groups flagged with a secondary mark
  "?N" when I enter the summary buffer. This mark can be used by all
  the usual summary limiting commands. I've also got some group
  selection functions that allow me to show only threads with `new'
  headers or only `new' headers when entering a group. Optionally, the
  number of newly downloaded headers for a group can be displayed in
  the group buffer, although I don't know how much sense this makes
  for those who read their news online.

  Another function I find useful is having my `agent' groups flagged
  with a "?>" whenever articles have been downloaded via the use of
  `%' (gnus-downloadable-mark). I keep marking articles for download
  and then never reading them having forgotten. As with `new' articles
  I can select these articles when entering a group and use summary
  limiting commands on them.

  If anyone's interested I'll post my current patches to this
  list. Although the code seems fairly stable, it'd be good if some
  others could give it the once over and help me remove the `kludge
  factor' :-). As intimated above, I read my news *offline* via the
  `agent' and so I've yet to verify what potential damage my code can
  do in an *online* situation.

-- 
Mike.