wim delvaux posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Thu, 30 Mar 2006 03:20:00 +0200:
> Hi all, > > Because of memory problems when loading I would like to automatically > remove messages from groups that no longer are on the server (or are > older than some time). > > I found in the archive that there was an 'intention' to add it to 0.13 > however I cannot seem to find the option to expire in 0.14.x. > > Is it already implemented and if so where is it ? If not how can i > Shrink my messages lists Messages no longer on the server should be auto-deleted as soon as you sync with the server. PAN has done that for years, I thought back to 0.11 when I started using it, but maybe I'm wrong on that. Some servers have quite long retention, however. Gmane (gmane.org), the mailing list to news server I follow this list on, for instance, is an archive -- it doesn't expire messages at all, so they stay around in PAN until they are purged manually. You can set up a system to make it easy to expire old messages in PAN, but you do still have to trigger the expire manually. (If you read the thread about PAN-NG, to be released to beta April first, it appears from the screenshot that it will have an auto-expire feature built in, but you are asking about current 0.14.x PAN.) First, create a new filter, I call mine ">30 day read". In the new filter dialog (Tools, Filters, New), set the name, select Article is at least N days old, and set N as desired, then press the Add New Line to the Filter button. If you want to expire /all/ old messages, including ones still marked unread, fine. Here, I keep mark messages I want to keep around unread again, and I do NOT want to delete them, so I added a second filter condition, Article is read, and ensured the "ALL OF" condition was set, so it would only match if the message was >30 days old AND the message was marked read. OK out of the new filter dialog and you should now see the new filter listed in the filter dialog. Now, create a rule to expire messages that match the filter. In the New Rule dialog (Tools, Rules, New), set the name, I call mine "30 day read expire". On the Newsgroups tab, decide which groups you want the rule to apply to, all of them or only certain groups, and set accordingly. On the Filters tab, select the filter created above. On the Actions tab, select Delete Article. OK out and the new rule should be shown in the rules dialog. With the rule in place, whenever you want to expire messages, select the groups you want to apply the rule to, open the rules dialog, select that rule, and hit apply to selected groups. If you want to apply it to all groups, of course, you don't have to worry about selected groups. If you are just applying it to one group, make sure it's the only one selected, and apply to selected groups. Of course, if you didn't set the rule to apply to all groups in the first place, it will only match on the ones that meet /both/ the rule requirement and the apply action you choose. Thus, it's possible to set a general 30 day expire for your text groups, and a shorter one for the space hogging binary groups, if desired, and either by setting the appropriate groups in the rule itself or by selecting only the appropriate groups when you apply the rule, get each rule to apply only to the desired groups. With that in place, all you have to do is remember to run the expire rule occasionally, and you are all set! =8^) I've been using an expire rule that way for some time now, with no issues. The one possible exception would be if you have apply to incoming selected, and you didn't choose to only expire read articles. If someone has a clock that's set seriously in the past and posts, his message will be expired as it's downloaded, as it meets the criteria. Conversely, if someone has their clock set seriously in the future, the rule won't expire their posts until time catches up, read or not. I've seen someone post with a clock a year or more out of date on a few occasions, but it doesn't happen often, and they usually fix it as soon as someone points it out. (I believe certain spammers occasionally try setting their clock to the future, however. The problem is that many servers will reject/filter a post made more than X time in the future, or Y time in the past, in part to prevent irritants like that from occurring. Even if they don't, such a technique makes the spam easy to sort out and delete, so the trick often backfires, if the intent was to be as irritating to as many people as possible, which seems the mission in life of most spammers.) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
