marking articles when reading them

[Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann)]

Right now, reading a message marks it as read (or expirable, if
auto-expire is turned on, but I won't be talking about auto-expire for
the moment).

Of course, that's just the way that Gnus operates: it pretends your
mail is like news, and so reading a message should make it go away,
sort of.

But new Gnus users might not want this behavior.  For them, it would
be useful to tell Gnus to, say, tick a message when it is read, rather
than marking it as read.

I suggest the following: introduce a variable
`gnus-select-article-mark' (or somesuch).  This variable defaults to
gnus-read-mark.  And the functions gnus-summary-mark-unread-as-read
and gnus-summary-mark-read-and-unread-as-read use that variable rather
than the hard-coded gnus-read-mark.

Since this variable can be set in a group-local fashion, it would be
easy for users to define `important' mail groups, where the default
would be to keep the message when it is read.  And in mail groups that
contain mailing lists, the default behavior can be kept.

I used to use a similar behavior for a year or so (in the olden days
of (ding) Gnus), and a colleague still uses it.

What do you all think?

kai

PS: Should the variable be a group parameter for easy customization
    with `G c'?
-- 
I like BOTH kinds of music.