How to select articles by (author|subject|...)

How to select articles by (author|subject|...)

[Lars Clausen]

When going into large newsgroups or mail folders, I frequently need to just
find articles that are from a certain person or with a certain subject.  I
can't see any easy way to do this in Gnus.  I would expect
gnus-group-select-by-author or similar.  I have been perusing the info
pages and FAQs to no avail.  Is there a way to do this?

If not, how hard would it be to make Gnus do the following:

Allow entering a group showing only articles matching a certain regexp.

Interface with BBDB to get From: names and aliases.
  E.g. 
M-x gnus-group-select-some-articles
Select articles by (F)rom, (S)ubject, (D)ate, (R)egexp? F
Select articles from: Kai[TAB]
Select articles from: Kai Großjohann

Interface with a mail database of some kind (haven't started using any, as
I can't use it from Gnus yet).

Thanks,
-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?

Re: How to select articles by (author|subject|...)

[Jesper Harder]

Lars Clausen <lrclause@cs.uiuc.edu> writes:

> When going into large newsgroups or mail folders, I frequently need to
> just find articles that are from a certain person or with a certain
> subject.  I can't see any easy way to do this in Gnus.  I would expect
> gnus-group-select-by-author or similar.  I have been perusing the info
> pages and FAQs to no avail.  Is there a way to do this?
>
> If not, how hard would it be to make Gnus do the following:
>
> Allow entering a group showing only articles matching a certain
> regexp.

You could do it by entering the group with:

    `C-u M-RET' (gnus-group-quick-select-group, to make it a bit faster)

and then limit by, say, author with `\ a'.  

There is an NNTP extension command, "XPAT", which would allow the
filtering to be done server side -- but Gnus doesn't have support for
it. 

> Interface with a mail database of some kind (haven't started using
> any, as I can't use it from Gnus yet).

Look for `nnir.el' (by Kai Großjohann) which supports various indexing
engines: swish, namazu etc.

Re: How to select articles by (author|subject|...)

[Lars Clausen]

On 17 May 2002, Tim Haynes wrote:
> Lars Clausen <lrclause@cs.uiuc.edu> writes:
> 
>> When going into large newsgroups or mail folders, I frequently need to
>> just find articles that are from a certain person or with a certain
>> subject. I can't see any easy way to do this in Gnus. I would expect
>> gnus-group-select-by-author or similar. I have been perusing the info
>> pages and FAQs to no avail. Is there a way to do this?
>> 
>> If not, how hard would it be to make Gnus do the following:
>> 
>> Allow entering a group showing only articles matching a certain regexp.
> 
>  | / a runs the command gnus-summary-limit-to-author
>  | (gnus-summary-limit-to-author FROM &optional NOT-MATCHING)
>  | 
>  | Limit the summary buffer to articles that have authors that match a
>  | regexp.  If NOT-MATCHING, excluding articles that have authors that
>  | match a regexp.
> 
> Might not be quite all you asked for, but is it a step in the right
> direction?

The problem is when I want to find something in my >10,000 messages 'other'
mail folder, it just takes too long to load.

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?

Re: How to select articles by (author|subject|...)

[Kai Großjohann]

Lars Clausen <lrclause@cs.uiuc.edu> writes:

> The problem is when I want to find something in my >10,000 messages
> 'other' mail folder, it just takes too long to load.

I think you will like nnir.el with the right search engine.

kai
-- 
Silence is foo!