Keeping interesting messages

Keeping interesting messages

[Paul Moore]

I'm pretty much set up the way I want now with Gnus. I'm using Oort
Gnus 0.06 with the Agent, and I have adaptive scoring, mail splitting,
and expiry sorted (at least as a good starting point).

One thing I'm still not sure of the best way to handle, though. I'd
like to be able to "keep" messages and news articles that interest me
- possibly for a long time, possibly just for a few days (until I get
a chance to deal with it). I don't want to leave the messages unread,
as that interferes with my normal scan-read-catchup approach to
reading groups. I'd rather keep the messages either in their original
groups, or in some sort of "parallel" arrangement, so I don't lose
track of where they came from.

At the moment, I'm ticking articles (I'm assuming that neither
total-expire nor the agent expiry will delete ticked articles). This
is OK for "keep until I get round to it" articles, but not so good for
longer-term retention (the ticked articles are too obtrusive).

I've considered marking articles as dormant, but that doesn't seem
quite right for what I want. I thought about saving the articles to
some form of mbox file, but again I'm not sure that will be what I
want. Copying the articles to an "interesting" folder is an option,
but that loses the association with the original source (can I add an
X-Original-Group header when copying, and filter on that, maybe?)

Does anyone have any suggestions on a good way of handling this sort
of thing? I'd love it if Gnus gave me a way of easily weeding the good
stuff from the cr*p - nothing I've ever found before has been ideal
(the nearest I got was marking articles as "Keep" but "Read" in Forte
Agent, but it was still a little too easy to forget the good articles
I'd saved...)

Thanks in advance,
Paul.

Re: Keeping interesting messages

[Frank Schmitt]

Paul Moore <gustav@morpheus.demon.co.uk> writes:

> Does anyone have any suggestions on a good way of handling this sort
> of thing? I'd love it if Gnus gave me a way of easily weeding the good
> stuff from the cr*p - nothing I've ever found before has been ideal
> (the nearest I got was marking articles as "Keep" but "Read" in Forte
> Agent, but it was still a little too easy to forget the good articles
> I'd saved...)

I tick articles for short term and if I want to keep them for a longer
term I say 
B c <nnfolder+archive: Groupname>
If this group does already exist, the article is copied there,
otherwise Gnus asks to create the group.

-- 
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Re: Keeping interesting messages

[Josh Huber]

Paul Moore <gustav@morpheus.demon.co.uk> writes:

> One thing I'm still not sure of the best way to handle, though. I'd
> like to be able to "keep" messages and news articles that interest me
> - possibly for a long time, possibly just for a few days (until I get
> a chance to deal with it). I don't want to leave the messages
> unread, as that interferes with my normal scan-read-catchup approach
> to reading groups. I'd rather keep the messages either in their
> original groups, or in some sort of "parallel" arrangement, so I
> don't lose track of where they came from.

This is what I do:

a) for messages I'm going to reply to, I immediately hit R C-c C-d if
   I don't have time to reply right away. (which is almost always)
   Then, the message is sitting in my drafts folder.
b) for saving interesting messages, I use a little function I wrote:

;; bind a key that copies an article to the group
;; archive.<groupname>

(defun jmh:save-archive ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((group-name (if (string-match ":" gnus-newsgroup-name)
			(substring gnus-newsgroup-name (match-end 0))
		      gnus-newsgroup-name)))
    (gnus-summary-copy-article 1 (concat "archive." group-name))))

(add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook
	  '(lambda ()
	     (local-set-key (kbd "C-c s") 'jmh:save-archive)
	     (local-set-key (kbd "C-c p") 'jmh:forward-to-spamcop)))

This way, if I want to save a message for longer-term, I just hit C-c
s.

Also, be sure to add whatever your archive groups are called to the
gnus-auto-subscribed-groups regexp.

ttyl,

-- 
Josh Huber

Re: Keeping interesting messages

[D. Goel]

in addition to all the other replies, 


somewhat related/unrelated---

i discovered the joys of caching recently.. 

 viz.  pressing * on an article does not let it go away when your
 news-server wants to delete it after some time..  

 moreove, this article shows up with that "*" mark on it.. whether
 read or unread.. , thus showing you that this is an article that
 'interested' you and you cached...

 (press * again to uncache..)

 

DG				   <http://www.glue.umd.edu/~deego/>
-- 
It is only the work of idealists that create surroundings in which
idealism is no longer necessary to let the good choices prevail.
     -- David Kastrup on 'Free Software vs. Conveninent Software'

Re: Keeping interesting messages

[Dheeraj Reddy]

D. Goel <deego@glue.umd.edu> writes:

> in addition to all the other replies, 
> 
> 
> somewhat related/unrelated---
> 
> i discovered the joys of caching recently.. 
> 
>  viz.  pressing * on an article does not let it go away when your
>  news-server wants to delete it after some time..  
> 
>  moreove, this article shows up with that "*" mark on it.. whether
>  read or unread.. , thus showing you that this is an article that
>  'interested' you and you cached...
> 
>  (press * again to uncache..)
FWIW
just tried it but i think its M-* to uncache.
-- 
dhee

Re: Keeping interesting messages

[Paul Moore]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai writes:

> I gather that you are happy with ticking (`!') for the
> keep-because-I-need-to-get-to-them messages.

So far, yes. (And I see no reason why that would change...)


> So it remains to see what to do about those that you keep but don't
> need to see every time.
>
> For them, you should separate mail from news.
>
> In mail, unless you have total-expire turned on, you can just mark the
> messages as read.  They will not be deleted, they will not be
> displayed by default.  Just what you want.
>
> If you do have total-expire turned on, or on news, this is not what
> you want.

I do have total-expire turned on. At least for mailing-list groups
(which, to my mind, are effectively news under a different
transport). For my non-total-expire mail groups, I do just mark things
as read. I guess I need to get into the discipline of marking messages
I *don't* want to retain as expirable.

[[BTW, this raises a separate question - is there any sense in
splitting my nnml method into two - one for mailing lists, where
total-expire is on for all groups, and one for personal mail, where
expiry is on a manual basis? I can see it being useful to make a clear
distinction between the two use cases, but is the inconvenience of
using two methods sufficient to make this a bad idea?]]

> In this case, you could consider to mark them dormant.
>
> For news, another alternative (in addition to marking them dormant)
> is to put them in the cache with `*'.  They stay there, they are not
> deleted, they are normally not displayed.
>
> To summarize: if you want to treat mail and news the same, I suggest
> to (setq gnus-use-cache t) and to make nnml groups uncacheable (see
> the variables gnus-cacheable-groups and gnus-uncacheable-groups).
> Then you tick the `todo' messages and you mark the `archived' ones as
> dormant.

I'm using the Agent, so I presume that the cache isn't necessary?
This is assuming that the agent expiry process does not expire ticked
or dormant messages...?

> (In this case, you could turn total-expire on, but you don't need
> to.)

I'm missing something here - why don't I need total-expire? I want to
expire mailing-list type mail, without having to do so manually. And
I'm using adaptive scoring, so auto-expire isn't a good idea...

> If you want to treat mail and news separately, turn total-expire off
> and mark messages as read for mail, and use the cache for news.
>
> What do you think?

It sounds good. And I can add archiving to a separate group (as
suggested by others) as a 3rd, even longer term (in some sense) way of
saving articles. More possibilities than I'm ever likely to need :-)

To try it out, I'll mark this posting as dormant now, as it's a great
analysis of the situation, and I can see wanting to go back to it in
the future...

Thanks for the suggestions, and especially for the clear and detailed
analysis of the different behaviours, which was possibly even more
valuable than the specific suggestions :-)

Paul.

Re: Keeping interesting messages

[Kai Großjohann]

Paul Moore <gustav@morpheus.demon.co.uk> writes:

> [[BTW, this raises a separate question - is there any sense in
> splitting my nnml method into two - one for mailing lists, where
> total-expire is on for all groups, and one for personal mail, where
> expiry is on a manual basis? I can see it being useful to make a clear
> distinction between the two use cases, but is the inconvenience of
> using two methods sufficient to make this a bad idea?]]

The mail-sources code currently only allows a single server to
receive mail.  While it would be possible to circumvent that, it
would be a hassle.

With two different servers, you could distinguish between the
nnml+ml:foo groups (for mailing lists) and the nnml+pm:foo groups
(for personal mail).

But with one server, you can distinguish between nnml:ml.foo and
nnml:pm.foo which IMHO is just as good.  What do you think?

kai
-- 
~/.signature is: umop 3p!sdn    (Frank Nobis)