Catching up Mail Groups

[aharon@healdb.matat.health.gov.il (Aharon (Al) Schkolnik)]

Hi all.

	I really like gnus. (Shall I say that a few more times before
I start complaining ?  ;-) ).


	My biggest complaint is the way read articles are handled in
mail groups. I use :


(setq gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups ".*:mail\..*")


which means that if I mark articles with E, they get expired. That is
a-good-thing. The problem is that I frequently forget, and mark
articles with d (that is what I'm used to doing in NNTP groups), or
simply want to catch-up the the group (with c). Then, the
articles are not expired. They stay around (invisibly) until I get
around to painstakenly cleaning them up by entering the group with C-u
<spc>, and then doing E down-arrow E down-arrow ad-nasuem. This is
a-bad-thing. So, I tried:

(setq gnus-total-expirable-newsgroups ".*:mail\..*")


This, I think, caused the desired effect of expiring the
articles. Although, quite frankly, I don't really understand the
difference between auto-expirable, and total-expirable. Anyway, the
performance hit was totally unacceptable - it took many, many seconds
each time I left a mail group (Expiring articles ........). This is
a-bad-thing. 


What I, and I believe many others, want is for articles in mail groups
which are not marked to be saved (u command), and which are read or
deleted, to be deleted after the expiration period. I guess what this
all means is that we want deletion (or whatever is done by
catching-up, the d command, etc.) to be treated as expiration. Of
course, this must be efficient. 


Thanks for your attention.


--
  The day is short, and the work is great,     |   Aharon Schkolnik
  and the laborers are lazy, and the reward    |   Aharon@Matat.Health.Gov.IL
  is great, and the Master of the house is     |
  impatient. - Ethics Of The Fathers Ch. 2     |