Re: 2 questions about EXPIRE setting in gnus

[winsphinX <xxx@yyy.zzz>]

David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu> writes:

> winsphinX <xxx@yyy.zzz> writes:
>
>> i set 'total expired' in gnus mail, and the mails are
>> disappeared after 7 days, I saw only about ten mails in
>> group buffer, obviously many mails were expiresd,but in
>> mini-buffer, it was still shown 'default 400', why? and the
>> disappeared mails are deleted or are only invisible?
>
> You're seeing two different effects.  First, Gnus by default will only
> show unread articles in a group (pressing C-u RET from the group
> buffer, or normal RET on a group with no unread or ticked articles,
> will show them all).  Total expiry will delete (as in, removed from
> the disk, gone forever) read mails that meet its criteria.
>
> Your other options are auto-expiry (reading an article marks it
> expirable rather than read, but no non-expirable article is ever
> expired) and manual expiry ('E' on an article marks it expirable and
> it will eventually get deleted).
>

thanks, bacause i couldnot distinguish exactly total-expire and
aoto-expire, i set both. After reading your explains, i think
total-exp can free more disk space, isn't it?

>> and the second question is, when i set the same setting in
>> gnus newsgroup, is doesn't work. i need such a result -- the
>> news before 7 days will be automatic deleted to free my disk
>> space.
>
> The newsgroup articles live on the news server, not on your local
> machine.  So you can't usefully set any expiry option there (you can't
> cause the server to delete its articles) but the newsgroup also
> shouldn't be taking up any space locally.
>

yes, i know newsgroups posts are on the servers, but after i
retrieving/reading a post, i think it should be on my disk. days by
days, even the posts are very few bytes, they will still consume disk
space, so what i need is to free local disk space -- maybe by another
way instead of expiry.