Re: Moving articles destroys all marks

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

dsg@mitre.org (David S. Goldberg) writes:

> I like the simple approach we have now; whatever marks are associated
> with the article are preserved across the move.

The simplicity is always attractive, granted.

For a long while, I've been using Gnus without marking articles as "read"
automatically on first visit, preferring to have full control over when
I really want an article to disappear out of sight.  A very instructive
thread on `ding' convinced me to try otherwise, and by now, I'm glad to
have made that move.  Oh, it is still a little irritating having to `M-u'
so often, but yet, overall, there is less typing now.  The only drawback,
and it was a serious one for me, is how easily I was "loosing" articles
while moving them around (and I do move articles a lot :-).  Forget to
`M-u', and you're done: you even have to fight a bit to recover the article
immediately, if you happen to notice your mistake.  If you do not notice,
you've just lost an article for all practical purposes.  A single mistake,
you loose more than all the time you saved by the change of paradigm, at
least for that day.  Better _never_ make mistakes, but that's too much of
a pressure for the little me, I am loosing an important part of my comfort.

My need is simple: to be sure I do not loose articles while moving them
elsewhere.  In my case, the automatic reading that comes with opening an
article is plain unwelcome when the article has to be sorted elsewhere.
My feeling is that this automatic reading should be undone, automatically as
much as possible -- so I just cannot forget to do it.  Whatever scheme that
let me sort articles as I want, and is not error-prone, is acceptable to me.

My suggestion to "unread" before moving comes from that need.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard