nnmairix tips and tricks

• Checking Mail

  I put all my important mail groups at group level 1. The mairix groups have group level 5, so they do not get checked at start up (see Group Levels).

  I use the following to check for mails:

  (defun my-check-mail-mairix-update (level)
    (interactive "P")
    ;; if no prefix given, set level=1
    (gnus-group-get-new-news (or level 1))
    (nnmairix-update-groups "mairixsearch" t t)
    (gnus-group-list-groups))
  
  (define-key gnus-group-mode-map "g" 'my-check-mail-mairix-update)

  Instead of ‘"mairixsearch"’ use the name of your nnmairix server. See the doc string for nnmairix-update-groups for details.

• Example: search group for ticked articles

  For example, you can create a group for all ticked articles, where the articles always stay unread:

  Hit G b g, enter group name (e.g., ‘important’), use ‘F:f’ as query and do not include threads.

  Now activate marks propagation for this group by using G b p. Then activate the always-unread feature by using G b r twice.

  So far so good—but how do you remove the tick marks in the nnmairix group? There are two options: You may simply use nnmairix-remove-tick-mark-original-article (bound to G G u) to remove tick marks from the original article. The other possibility is to set nnmairix-propagate-marks-to-nnmairix-groups to t, but see the above comments about this option. If it works for you, the tick marks should also exist in the nnmairix group and you can remove them as usual, e.g., by marking an article as read.

  When you have removed a tick mark from the original article, this article should vanish from the nnmairix group after you have updated the mairix database and updated the group. Fortunately, there is a function for doing exactly that: nnmairix-update-groups. See the previous code snippet and the doc string for details.

• Dealing with auto-subscription of mail groups

  As described before, all nnmairix groups are in fact stored on the mail back end in the form ‘zz_mairix-<NAME>-<NUMBER>’. You can see them when you enter the back end server in the server buffer. You should not subscribe these groups! Unfortunately, these groups will usually get auto-subscribed when you use nnmaildir or nnml, i.e., you will suddenly see groups of the form ‘zz_mairix*’ pop up in your group buffer. If this happens to you, simply kill these groups with C-k. For avoiding this, turn off auto-subscription completely by setting the variable gnus-auto-subscribed-groups to nil (see Filtering New Groups), or if you like to keep this feature use the following kludge for turning it off for all groups beginning with ‘zz_’:

  (setq gnus-auto-subscribed-groups
        "^\\(nnml\\|nnfolder\\|nnmbox\\|nnmh\\|nnbabyl\\|nnmaildir\\).*:\\([^z]\\|z$\\|\\z[^z]\\|zz$\\|zz[^_]\\|zz_$\\).*")