Re: Keeping interesting messages

[Paul Moore <gustav@morpheus.demon.co.uk>]

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.