Renumbering aricles in mail folders?

Renumbering aricles in mail folders?

[Christoph Seibert]

Hi!

I'm using Gnus 5.4.52 and the nnml backend for my mail. Is there a way
to get nnml to renumber the articles in a folder? For example, the
highest article number in my mail.other folder is 507, but there
aren't that many messages in the folder because I deleted several
mails. Now every time I enter the folder, Gnus asks me how many
messages it should display, because it assumes there are 507 messages
in there. I could of course turn off that request, but is there a
better way?

Is this related to the fact that I delete mails using B DEL? Should I
use the expiry mechanism to get rid of unwanted mail? Would that be
the "proper" way, or is there no such thing?

Bye,
Christoph

-- 
--- Christoph Seibert (seibert@cs.uni-bonn.de seibert@dmcs.de) ---
-- Farlon Dragon -==(UDIC)==-    http://home.pages.de/~seibert/ --
- Who can possibly rule if no one                                -
-         who wants to can be allowed to?     - D. Adams, HHGTTG -

Re: Renumbering aricles in mail folders?

[Kai Grossjohann]

>>>>> On 02 Apr 1998, Christoph Seibert said:

  Christoph> I'm using Gnus 5.4.52 and the nnml backend for my
  Christoph> mail. Is there a way to get nnml to renumber the articles
  Christoph> in a folder?

Process-mark them all, then use B m to move them from the foo group to
the foo group (i.e. move them to the group they're in already).  This
will assign consecutive numbers to the messages, though the numbers
don't start at 1.  It will remove your gap problem, though.

  Christoph> Is this related to the fact that I delete mails using B
  Christoph> DEL? Should I use the expiry mechanism to get rid of
  Christoph> unwanted mail? Would that be the "proper" way, or is
  Christoph> there no such thing?

B DEL is okay.  I use the expiry mechanism only as a security
mechanism -- sometimes I find out a day later that I shouldn't have
deleted that mail and with an expiration time of a week I can get it
back.  Also, using expiry is useful in those cases where you don't
really care about a message but expect a followup a few days hence.
With expiry, you just mark the message as expirable and when the
followup comes the original will still be around for you to
conveniently refer to.  Without expiry you would have to decide
whether the keep the original around, having to remember to delete it
later, or you wouldn't have the original to refer to.

kai
-- 
Really cancel?   [OK]  [Cancel]

Re: Renumbering aricles in mail folders?

[Lars Balker Rasmussen]

Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.cs.uni-dortmund.de> writes:
> I use the expiry mechanism only as a security
> mechanism -- sometimes I find out a day later that I shouldn't have
> deleted that mail and with an expiration time of a week I can get it
> back.  

Actually, IMHO, that feature would be a good deal more useful if the
expiration time was from the moment the article was expired, and not
from arrival time.  I've lost a couple of mails I shouldn't have
because I was a bit too quick on the E and q keys.
-- 
Lars Balker Rasmussen                                           "Woo hoo!?"
.

Re: Renumbering aricles in mail folders?

[Dan Christensen]

Lars Balker Rasmussen <lbr@image.dk> writes:
> Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.cs.uni-dortmund.de> writes:
> > I use the expiry mechanism only as a security
> > mechanism -- sometimes I find out a day later that I shouldn't have
> > deleted that mail and with an expiration time of a week I can get it
> > back.  
> 
> Actually, IMHO, that feature would be a good deal more useful if the
> expiration time was from the moment the article was expired, and not
> from arrival time.  I've lost a couple of mails I shouldn't have
> because I was a bit too quick on the E and q keys.

I agree with Lars, here.  His suggested change would be helpful.

What I'd *really* like is to be able to mark an article as expirable
on a certain date.  For example, the keystroke `E' could take a number
of days as a prefix and add a header to the article that says, for
example, "expire me on April 13, 1998".  The default number of days
would be nnmail-expiry-wait, and this number would be added to the
current date.  

Dan

-- 
Dan Christensen
jdc@math.jhu.edu