Re: automatically mark article expirable when first article in a thread is expirable

[David Z Maze]

David Bonnafous <david.bonnafous@math.ups-tlse.fr> writes:

> I am not a lisp guru, so if someone resolved this problem, could you
> explain me how ?
>
> I subscribed lots of mailing list. When a new thread begin, if the
> subject of this thread don't interest me I must delete (or mark as
> expirable) all the next mails in that thread. It is annoying...
>
> Gnus is certainly able to do that for me, but how ?

My mailing list approach isn't exactly what you describe, but it might
wind up having the same net effect and works almost out-of-the-box.

(1) Things that are mailing lists are marked total-expirable using
    group properties ('G c' from the group buffer for the friendly
    interface, 'G p' for the unfriendly interface).  Then any article
    that is marked read in any form is considered for expiry,
    expirable marks are irrelevant.

(2) I use Gnus' automatic scoring mechanism to remember which articles
    I like and dislike:

    (setq gnus-use-adaptive-scoring '(word line)
          gnus-decay-scores t)

(3) If I "like" a thread, I read it normally; if I "dislike" it, I
    explicitly kill it with C-k from the summary buffer.  This causes
    the author/subject (though not the thread per se) to have their
    scores increased or decreased, respectively, when I exit the
    group.

(4) The next time I come back to the group, Gnus compares the subject
    lines and authors with the saved score information.  Threads I've
    previously killed off (and ones that sound similar) get negative
    scores.  Articles with negative scores get automatically marked
    read with no intervention on my part (though they do appear when I
    open the summary buffer).

There's quite a bit on scoring in the Gnus manual; see (gnus)Scoring.
I've gone over the expiry options quite recently on this newsgroup.
The only real difference between my scheme and yours is that you'll
wind up deleting the threads you don't read and keeping the rest
(forever, assuming no other expiry options); both my liked and
disliked threads stick around until the expiry hits.

  --dzm