Re: nnimap, expiry-wait, and total-expire

[Kai Grossjohann]

Roland Roberts <roland@astrofoto.org> writes:

> With nnml for my backend, I used to always have use
> gnus-total-expirable-newsgroups with various settings of expiry-wait
> to automatically expire my email lists.  With nnimap, I was trying to
> do the equivalent with total-expire and expiry-wait set via group
> parameters.  It was not behaving as I was expecting; namely, all
> groups with total-expire set were having all their articles expire in
> 7 days.  Groups without the setting were doing nothing (as expected).
> This is Gnus 5.9.

This sounds like a bug.  A lot of things have happened in nnimap so
maybe the bug has been fixed in Gnus 5.10.  However, I don't recall
somebody having talked about this specific problem.  OTOH, I don't
remember everything that has been talked about ;-)

> I've removed the total-expire setting and only left the expiry-wait,
> but I'm not clear from the documentation if this is going to do what I
> want, namely subject every article to expiration (read or not) after
> the specified number of days.

This will /not/ subject every article to expiration.

Without total-expire, you can hit E (not e) on a message to mark it as
expirable.  It will then be expired later, according to expiry-wait.

(You can turn auto-expire on, then Gnus will hit E for you when you
read a message.  This has an effect similar to total-expire.)

Note that even with total-expire, unread articles will /not/ be
expired.

Kai