[Pan-users] Re: expire / purge obsoleted messages

[Duncan]

wim delvaux posted <address@hidden>,
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