Re: [O] Org referring to Gnus mail

[William Gardella]

François Pinard <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello.
>
> In my Org files, I have many references to Gnus articles which are part
> of mailgroups.  When batch reading email with Gnus, I'm OK with the
> newsreader paradigm, in which an article is almost deleted as soon as it
> gets read: it will not show the next time I'll visit the group.
>
> However, when an article is referred through an Org link, I think I
> would prefer if the paradigm did not apply.  Currently, I see myself
> "unreading" such articles all the time, which is a bit tedious, and
> error prone as well, as I can easily forget to do it.  I wonder if
> someone would not imagine some trickery by which, when the reference
> comes from Org, the Gnus article does not get automatically read.
>
> If references were always established "manually", I could take the habit
> of banging each article on which there is an Org link, at the time I
> establish the link.  The nicety is that a ticked article does not
> "become read" when visited.

Hi François,

I am sure there is a better answer out there, but there is another
nicety of Gnus you could exploit: marks (including the "read" mark) are
never populated to a Gnus group automatically on reading, but only when
you do an updating command such as q or x.  If you close the group with
`gnus-summary-exit-no-update' (the Q key in default binding), these
messages will not be marked as read.

>
> However, in the practical case, I have an Emacs command, launching an
> external helper program, which finds all articles within all mailgroups
> within the few local servers, matching a specific regexp somewhere, and
> then outputs a conveniently sorted Org tree holding [[...][...]] links
> to them all.  As the matches transiently depend on the pattern, it would
> prefer avoiding any kind of side effects on the unread articles.
>
> François
>
> P.S. I'm quite surprised by the speed of the search.  Grepping through
> 540 Megs of text distributed in over 10000 files takes a bit less than
> half a second, once the memory cache got populated.  It's hard for me to
> believe, and I'm unsuccessfully looking for a bug.  It apparently works!

So you have a command to automatically populate an Org tree from local
newsgroups?  Wow, sounds cool.  I've long wondered if Org would make a
good mailreader, and it sounds like you've determined that yes, it could
:)

--
Cheers,
WGG