Re: suggestion for expiry

[Toby Speight <Toby.Speight@streapadair.freeserve.co.uk>]

Simon> Simon Josefsson <URL:mailto:jas@pdc.kth.se>

0> In <URL:news:iluiu74bxrp.fsf@unikabox.pdc.kth.se>, Simon wrote:

Simon> Max Froumentin <masmef@maths.bath.ac.uk> writes:

>> I don't think that using the filesystem's access-time would work on
>> individual articles in nnfolders.

That's the reason I only mentioned nnml and nnmh ;-)


Simon> Gnus use a date from X-Gnus-Article-Number in nnfolder's when
Simon> expiring articles, it could be modified to update that date to
Simon> indicate when the article actually became eligeble for
Simon> expiring.

Perhaps it could use an Expires header (consistent with news article
format now), with the caveat that when it's changed, it's never made
earlier.  I think some other MUAs generate Expires headers (I'll have
to test this tomorrow, as I'm on my way out now), and so this would
allow those to work.  It would require some checking on incoming mail
(at split time?) to enforce upper and lower bounds on sender-supplied
expire times, with nnmail-expiry-wait being the default.  Then any
significant change to an expirable item pushes the expiry date out.

This has the benefit that the expiry date is visible to the user, too.