Expire messages in group

Expire messages in group

[Christian Schmitt]

Hi,
I've been using Gnus for some time now and really like it a lot.

Now there's one thing I was trying to do today, but haven't found the
"handle" yet.

I have this one nnmail group that holds messages from a mailing
list. I haven't (so far) set anything that has to do with
expiration. Now this group has gotten quite large and I want to delete
all messages older than let's say 90 days.

How can I talk Gnus into marking all messages older than 90 days as
expirable and then expire them?

TIA,
Christian Schmitt

-- 
Recursive (ri-ker-siv): adj; See "recursive"

Re: Expire messages in group

[David Z Maze]

Christian Schmitt <Christian.Schmitt@dresdner-bank.com> writes:

> I have this one nnmail group that holds messages from a mailing
> list. I haven't (so far) set anything that has to do with
> expiration. Now this group has gotten quite large and I want to delete
> all messages older than let's say 90 days.
>
> How can I talk Gnus into marking all messages older than 90 days as
> expirable and then expire them?

There are a few ways to do this.  First off, you can use the marking
commands to mark existing articles as expirable; '/ d -90' would limit
the buffer to articles older than 90 days, then 'M P b' would mark all
of these articles and 'M-& E' would mark them expirable.

You can use 'G c' from the *Group* buffer to change group parameters.
If it were me, I'd set the group in question to be total-expirable,
with a delay of 90 days; this means that, after 90 days, any article
that's read (not just expirable) will be considered for expiry.  The
alternative is auto-expirable, which marks articles expirable rather
than read when you read them (though you can change them back).

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell