Re: organizing mail

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

Christoph Groth <cgroth@gmx.net> writes:

> Sometimes I'd like to search for a certain message which is perhaps
> several years old.  `A s' would do the job but this command seems to
> be confined to one group and I've got a different group for every
> month.  So I usually end up using a combination of `find' and `grep'.
> Is there an elegant way to do this in Gnus?

You could index your mail with a search engine and use nnir.el.
Warning: I wrote nnir.el initially.

Or you could use nnvirtual to combine monthly groups into annual
groups, say.

> Can someone recommend another way of storing huge amounts of old mail
> (i.e. not in a monthly group)?  Should I use another select method
> than nnml (which wastes a lot of inodes and sectors)?

I think disk space is not the issue these days.  Of course, you could
try nnfolder which uses one file per group.  But that becomes quite
slow for large groups.

Another alternative to nnml is nnmaildir.  They have different speed
tradeoffs, but in general both are fast for large groups.  nnmaildir
also uses the one-file-per-message format, though.

> All my outgoing mail goes to a monthly changed archive-group.  When
> looking at a thread of discussion I am having with a friend, I can (of
> course) only see the messages sent by him or her as I'm looking at his
> or her group.  Is there a nice way to show a thread containing some
> messages sent by another person and some messages sent by myself?
> I.e. it should look like a thread in a news group or mailing list.

You can use the nnvirtual trick to combine the outgoing and the
incoming archive groups.

But I suggest not to separate them in the first place: just put all
your outgoing messages into the same group that the incoming messages
are in.  The gcc-self group parameter can help you with this: it
creates a Gcc header pointing to the group you're posting from.

If you really need to see messages from a specific author, you can
still use `/ a' to limit the summary buffer.  Limiting, btw, is a
great feature.

> And finally one last thing: From time to time I get messages that have
> the same subject as some old message.  I would like to start a new
> thread for this message instead of showing it in one thread together
> with the old messages.  Perhaps the References-Header could be used
> for this?

Gnus knows to "gather" threads.  This means that messages that are
NOT part of the same thread will be displayed adjacently.  Just turn
gathering off, then you'll get what you want, I think.

M-x apropos-variable RET gnus.*gather RET

-- 
A preposition is not a good thing to end a sentence with.