Re: Agent and mail groups

[Simon Josefsson]

jesse@phiwumbda.org (Jesse F. Hughes) writes:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>
>> (I do use agent with IMAP, but I rarely delete anything on the server,
>> so I wouldn't typically discover this problem.)
>
> So your IMAP groups just grow and grow?

Yup.

> How big do they get?

I have one mailbox for each month, for personal mail, so they don't
get very large.  I'm using gmane.org for many mailing lists nowadays,
but before I used to have 10k messages in many groups, with around 50k
in the Ding list.  My various spam/junk folders are largish though,
perhaps above 100k messages or so.

> Doesn't it take a while to enter a group?

Reading newly arrived messages is fast, which is almost the only thing
I do.  To C-u RET a group is not that expensive up until ~15k articles,
or so.

> I've been thinking of setting very large expiry times for a couple of
> groups -- six months to a year, just so if I overlook something
> important, it will still be there.  Is this reasonable?  Any tips on
> efficiency?

Make sure the nnimap servers are agentized, and cache everything.  My
custom block says:

 '(gnus-agent-consider-all-articles t)
 '(gnus-agent-enable-expiration (quote DISABLE))
 '(gnus-select-article-hook (quote (gnus-agent-fetch-selected-article ...

This will make Gnus cache NOV headers and all articles.  The server
traffic, when you enter a group, is getting headers for the new
messages, and synching flags.  And once read, articles are cached
locally forever.