For a long time, I have wanted the following feature: after I have
manually moved a certain article to a certain group, I want all
followups (or replies) to that article to go to that same group
automatically.

Back in the sixties, I created the following patch which will enable
Gnus to do that.  I'm interested in you folks trying it out to see if
it works.  Lars has said that he's willing to add this feature to Gnus
but that he's going to rewrite the mail splitting thing.  Now that
he's rewritten mail fetching, I think this is a good time to once
again check whether this feature works, before actually integrating it
into the Gnus core.

What does the patch do?

Well, Gnus keeps a log of recently seen mail in ~/.nnmail-cache.  This
patch just adds the group name along with the message id, and then
there's a splitting function for nnmail-split-fancy which looks up
message ids in the In-Reply-To and References headers in that file to
find out the right group name.  The file format is
backward-compatible, i.e. you can continue to use your existing file;
the group name will be added to newly encountered messages.  And the
patch is smart enough to only put the group name in if it's a group in
the mail backend where mail is split to.  (This is also the part that
will need to be changed when mail splitting is improved.)

The patch is for pgnus 0.63 but still applies cleanly to 0.73, except
for an offset of some lines.

How do you use it?

You need not do anything for this to store the message ids in
~/.nnmail-cache.  The patch defines a function
nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent which can be invoked from
nnmail-split-fancy like so:

  (setq nnmail-split-fancy
        '(| (: nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent)
            ;; other splits go here
         ))

Modify as appropriate.

I'm interested in all kinds of feedback.

kai
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