Re: gnus agent and copy/move articles

[kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de (Kai Großjohann)]

john_owens@yahoo.com (John Owens) writes:

> I'm trying to wrap my mind around how gnus is used in agent mode.
> I'm thinking about moving from a more conventional mailer (mostly
> because of this disconnected operation capability), and it
> would seem to me that if I'm on the road I would want a bunch of
> messages in an inbox that I would reply to then file in disconnected
> mode. 
>
> To do that would seem to require the ability to move messages
> between folders (i.e. from inbox to saved-folder). But perhaps the
> gnus way of doing things would be different? 

I guess that most Gnus users use splitting.  This might be called
filtering in other mail clients.  It means that Gnus looks at each
incoming message and then automatically files it into the right
folder, according to some rulse you specify.

If splitting puts all mails into the right folders, then manually
moving messages is not necessary.

Gnus' splitting is quite powerful.

> Alternatively, any plans to add this functionality in the future?

Of course, automatic splitting will never work perfectly, so surely
being able to move messages while offline is a good idea.  However,
it is not easy to implement it.

I found an easy way to implement it, but it suffers from the
disadvantage that you wouldn't be able to see the effect of moving
the message while you are offline.  (That is, the message disappears
from the source folder right away, gets stashed in a temp folder
while you're offline, and only arrives in the target folder when you
go back online.)  Clearly, this is not desirable.  Doing it right is
much more difficult.  If you think you have some ideas for the
implementation (you don't need to know the source to have ideas),
then please feel free to suggest something.
-- 
Ambibibentists unite!