Incorporating Old Mail Getting Mail Washing Mail
Traditional mail readers have a tendency to remove mail articles when you mark them as read, in some way. Gnus takes a fundamentally different approach to mail reading.
Gnus basically considers mail just to be news that has been received in a rather peculiar manner. It does not think that it has the power to actually change the mail, or delete any mail messages. If you enter a mail group, and mark articles as ``read'', or kill them in some other fashion, the mail articles will still exist on the system. I repeat: Gnus will not delete your old, read mail. Unless you ask it to, of course.
To make Gnus get rid of your unwanted mail, you have to mark the articles as expirable. This does not mean that the articles will disappear right away, however. In general, a mail article will be deleted from your system if, 1) it is marked as expirable, AND 2) it is more than one week old. If you do not mark an article as expirable, it will remain on your system until hell freezes over. This bears repeating one more time, with some spurious capitalizations: IF you do NOT mark articles as EXPIRABLE, Gnus will NEVER delete those ARTICLES.
You do not have to mark articles as expirable by hand. Groups that
match the regular expression gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups
will
have all articles that you read marked as expirable automatically. All
articles marked as expirable have an `E
' in the first
column in the summary buffer.
By default, if you have auto expiry switched on, Gnus will mark all the
articles you read as expirable, no matter if they were read or unread
before. To avoid having articles marked as read marked as expirable
automatically, you can put something like the following in your
`.gnus
' file:
(remove-hook 'gnus-mark-article-hook 'gnus-summary-mark-read-and-unread-as-read) (add-hook 'gnus-mark-article-hook 'gnus-summary-mark-unread-as-read)
Note that making a group auto-expirable doesn't mean that all read articles are expired---only the articles marked as expirable will be expired. Also note that using the d command won't make groups expirable---only semi-automatic marking of articles as read will mark the articles as expirable in auto-expirable groups.
Let's say you subscribe to a couple of mailing lists, and you want the articles you have read to disappear after a while:
(setq gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups "mail.nonsense-list\\|mail.nice-list")
Another way to have auto-expiry happen is to have the element
auto-expire
in the group parameters of the group.
If you use adaptive scoring (see Adaptive Scoring) and auto-expiring, you'll have problems. Auto-expiring and adaptive scoring don't really mix very well.
The nnmail-expiry-wait
variable supplies the default time an
expirable article has to live. Gnus starts counting days from when the
message arrived, not from when it was sent. The default is seven
days.
Gnus also supplies a function that lets you fine-tune how long articles
are to live, based on what group they are in. Let's say you want to
have one month expiry period in the `mail.private
' group, a one day
expiry period in the `mail.junk
' group, and a six day expiry period
everywhere else:
(setq nnmail-expiry-wait-function (lambda (group) (cond ((string= group "mail.private") 31) ((string= group "mail.junk") 1) ((string= group "important") 'never) (t 6))))
The group names this function is fed are ``unadorned'' group
names---no `nnml:
' prefixes and the like.
The nnmail-expiry-wait
variable and
nnmail-expiry-wait-function
function can either be a number (not
necessarily an integer) or one of the symbols immediate
or
never
.
You can also use the expiry-wait
group parameter to selectively
change the expiry period (see Group Parameters).
If nnmail-keep-last-article
is non-nil
, Gnus will never
expire the final article in a mail newsgroup. This is to make life
easier for procmail users.
By the way: That line up there, about Gnus never expiring non-expirable
articles, is a lie. If you put total-expire
in the group
parameters, articles will not be marked as expirable, but all read
articles will be put through the expiry process. Use with extreme
caution. Even more dangerous is the
gnus-total-expirable-newsgroups
variable. All groups that match
this regexp will have all read articles put through the expiry process,
which means that all old mail articles in the groups in question
will be deleted after a while. Use with extreme caution, and don't come
crying to me when you discover that the regexp you used matched the
wrong group and all your important mail has disappeared. Be a
man! Or a woman! Whatever you feel more comfortable
with! So there!
Most people make most of their mail groups total-expirable, though.
Incorporating Old Mail Getting Mail Washing Mail