On 2014-07-23 17:16, Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> I also have that value 7 and all my posts are there,
> from way back. Perhaps just because the posts are
> marked in certain ways, you still have to issue some
> command to have them removed from your disk. I don't
> know except I have old posts, lots of them.

I checked and I do too.

>> I want to make sure the articles are copied locally
>> to some place where they won't expire. However I
>> don't want to retain every article posted on these
>> newsgroups indefinitely.
>
> Why not? It is just a bunch of text files, all neatly
> organized already. My News directory is 5.7M!

I've been using gnus to read news and RSS for two weeks (before it was
only for email), and mine is at 53M. I see that all the RSS from gwene
is cached there as well.

> If you want to delete the files with discretion,
> perhaps you can tell Gnus never to do it (if indeed
> Gnus does it for you) and then write a script that
> deletes unwanted posts habitually while keeping some,
> based on the Message ID and Subject headers I
> mentioned.

I've dig a little into this, and it seems that one needs to manually
run 'gnus-agent-expire' or 'gnus-agent-expire-group'
(https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Agent-Expiry.html). By
the way, you should check the value of agent-enable-expiration in your
groups, if it's ENABLE and you call one of these commands, then old
messages will go away.

(A bit later ...) I marked the messages I wanted to keep with '*', and
I ran 'gnus-agent-expire'. It freed about 30M (it may seem small, but
recall that I've been using it for about 2 weeks). So I guess
a combination of '*' and regularly expiring is the solution here.

Alan

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