Re: Gnus IMAP Qs: catch-up vs delete vs expire & "gnus-expire" tag ?

[Joel Reicher]

David Masterson <dsmasterson@gmail.com> writes:

> I have a number of questions...
>
> I've been trying to set up my mailing list environment using 
> Gnus with IMAP/SMTP via zohomail.com.  I can read gnu.org 
> mailing lists via IMAP fine.
>
> 1. SMTP thru zohomail.com to gnu.org gets bounced as 
> "Undeliverable" due to a "550 - bad domain" error.  Zoho support 
> says the email looks fine.  I've been trying to get an answer 
> from sysadmin@fsf.org (email sent from my gmail account) for 
> several days, but no reply.  Anyone seen anything like this?

If you think Gnus/Message is responsible (i.e. sending with some 
other client is fine), then a faulty From: address is all I can 
think it might be.

> 2. Due to limited space in a free account on zohomail.com, I 
> want to clean up old mail on both my system and the server.  I 
> assumed the way to do that was (mostly) by "catchup", but that 
> just marks all the mails in the summary buffer as read.  How do 
> you delete old email?

There are a few ways, but you might want to start by reading

(info "(gnus) Expiring Mail")

You don't have to use expiry - the important part is what is done 
when Gnus actions the expiry, and this can be done without the 
expiry process - but personally I quite like it because setting 
marks is fast, and the actual deletion (server command) is done in 
bulk. It feels a lot like commit vs push in git to me.

> 3. I thought 'expire' was the way to delete, but the manual 
> implies that expired email can be deleted by Gnus at some future 
> time.  How is that controlled?

That's covered by the info page above. I use nnmail-expiry-wait 
immediate.

> 4. I found that the expired email wound up being tagged with 
> "gnus-expire" on the IMAP server.  Is there an assumption that 
> the IMAP server will delete emails tagged with "gnus-expire"? 
> If so, how does that work?

No. Expiry is actioned by Gnus. If you want to skip it completely 
(which I do at the moment in certain situations) you can do B DEL.

> 5. Is this documented in the Gnus manual?  At least the 
> assumptions of how the IMAP server should work around "deleting 
> emails".

I think you will find there's no working around; it's just that 
Gnus tries to unify the news and mail experience as sensibly as 
possible, which is a little nontrivial since deletion doesn't 
really exist for news. This is also not specific to IMAP.

A (possibly unnecessary) word of warning: the IMAP expunge 
operation has nothing to do with any of this, but it's easy to 
think it does.

Cheers,

       - Joel