Re: [OT] retrieving old messages

[Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>]

Dan Davison <dandavison7@gmail.com> writes:

> Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca> writes:
>
>> Dan <dandavison7@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Incidentally, can any gnus users tell me -- is there a non-painful way of
>>> retrieving an old message from nntp in order to create a reply in the correct
>>> thread? Or do you hack the headers to make it appear in the right thread? I'm
>>> using the gmane web interface to send this.
>>
>> I read the list through gnus and gmane.  When I'm in the summary buffer
>> for the org-mode list I can retrieve old messages with
>>
>>    / O 500 RET
>>
>> to get the last 500 messages from the list.
>
> Thanks Bernt and Seb, but that was the route I was referring to when I
> said "painful" :) The list volume is quite high, and retrieving
> thousands of messages takes a while. And of course you go for 1500 and
> it turns out to be message 1728...
>
> It seems a rather primitive practice, can we really not do better? Is it
> not possible to use a unique identifier to pull down a specific message?
> (I was not reading usenet or whatever it was called in the 1980s; I
> don't really know anything about these technologies.)

Hi Dan,

I also make org-capture mode links to interesting messages when I read
them if I intend to follow up on it at a later time.  So on a
gnus-message I just do C-M-r and create a task that links to the mail.
This means I can open the linked message directly from the captured
org-mode task with C-c C-o and just reply to that - and the reply is
threaded properly.  This is my preferred way to do this type of thing.

My email links to org-mode articles on gmane look like this:
[[gnus:nntp%2Bnews.gmane.org:gmane.emacs.orgmode#4CEE66D5.2030909@gmail.com][Email from Rainer M. Krug: OT: Question concerning vc-wor]]

When retrieving old messages with / O 500 RET it gets the next 500 older
messages you haven't already retrieved -- so if you're at 1500 and you
need to get to 1728 ... you just need to / O 228 RET to get the rest of
the way.  I rarely search though the entire list of messages for old
stuff - but I find this method of searching in Gnus much better than any
web based search -- since the message id isn't available in the gmane
web archives as far as I know.

-Bernt