Re: a couple of newbie questions with gnus

[Tassilo Horn <heimdall@uni-koblenz.de>]

unoder.spam@spam.jay.net (Martin Jørgensen) writes:

Hi Martin,

>>> 3) In mozilla thunderbird I enabled this option "Only show threads
>>> with new postings" so it'll automatically show the whole thread
>>> *only if* there are new replies in that thread. Threads where
>>> everything is read won't be shown...
>>>
>>> This is really nice - is it possible to do something with gnus?
>>
>> Sure, that's the default. Did you set gnus-fetch-old-headers to
>> anything?
>
> I think the default is that it only shows new messages... But it
> doesn't automatically show the old messages in that thread.

Sorry, I got you wrong. See

,----[ C-h v gnus-fetch-old-headers RET ]
| gnus-fetch-old-headers is a variable defined in `gnus-sum.el'.
| Its value is some
| 
| Documentation:
| *Non-nil means that Gnus will try to build threads by grabbing old
| headers.  If an unread article in the group refers to an older,
| already read (or just marked as read) article, the old article will
| not normally be displayed in the Summary buffer.  If this variable is
| t, Gnus will attempt to grab the headers to the old articles, and
| thereby build complete threads.  If it has the value `some', all old
| headers will be fetched but only enough headers to connect otherwise
| loose threads will be displayed.  This variable can also be a number.
| In that case, no more than that number of old headers will be fetched.
| If it has the value `invisible', all old headers will be fetched, but
| none will be displayed.
| 
| The server has to support NOV for any of this to work.
| 
| This feature can seriously impact performance it ignores all
| locally cached header entries.
| 
| You can customize this variable.
`----

So set it to t, if you want complete threads, or set it to 'some (that's
what I do), to get as many old articles as are needed to build a
complete sumthread.

If it's set to nil (the default) no old headers will be fetched.

So put either

  (setq gnus-fetch-old-headers t) ;; complete threads

or

  (setq gnus-fetch-old-headers 'some) ;; complete subthreads

into your ~/.gnus.el.

Bye,
Tassilo
-- 
"Emacs is not a development tool but a way of life."
     - David Kastrup in alt.religion.emacs -