How to get rid of many nnml mail directories en-masse

How to get rid of many nnml mail directories en-masse

[Harry Putnam]

Over the years I've accumulated many many nnml directories that are no
longer in use.

I know how to delete individual mail directories thru gnus
interface... but how can I delete dozens of them.

Something like just delete them and then excise them from .newsrc.eld?

Is there some way better than that... but doesn't take all day to do?

find ~/Mail/ -type d |wc -l shows 579 directories.  I'm guessing
something like 250-290 are actually in use or at least holding
something I want to keep.  So, I'm talking about something in the
neighborhood of 300 mail directories that need to bite the dust.

Re: How to get rid of many nnml mail directories en-masse

[Glyn Millington]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> Over the years I've accumulated many many nnml directories that are no
> longer in use.
>
> I know how to delete individual mail directories thru gnus
> interface... but how can I delete dozens of them.
>
> Something like just delete them and then excise them from .newsrc.eld?
>
> Is there some way better than that... but doesn't take all day to do?

Hi Harry, 

your question intrigued me because I had a few dozen such groups here. In
the absence of an answer from Those Who Know, this is how I did it.

1. In the group buffer hit 'L', to reveal all those unsubscribed groups.

2. Mark the UNwanted groups for processing and change them all to level 7
with S l

3. M-x gnus-group-kill-level and Gnus asks which level, tell it 7

that seems to have done the trick for me

hope that helps


Glyn