FAQ 6-2

Question 6.2

How to archive interesting messages?

Answer

If you stumble across an interesting message, say in gnu.emacs.gnus and want to archive it there are several solutions. The first and easiest is to save it to a file by saying ‘O f’. However, wouldn’t it be much more convenient to have more direct access to the archived message from Gnus? If you say yes, put this snippet by Frank Haun <[email protected]> in ~/.gnus.el:

(defun my-archive-article (&optional n)
  "Copies one or more article(s) to a corresponding `nnml:' group, e.g.,
`gnus.ding' goes to `nnml:1.gnus.ding'. And `nnml:List-gnus.ding' goes
to `nnml:1.List-gnus-ding'.

Use process marks or mark a region in the summary buffer to archive
more then one article."
  (interactive "P")
  (let ((archive-name
         (format
          "nnml:1.%s"
          (if (featurep 'xemacs)
              (replace-in-string gnus-newsgroup-name "^.*:" "")
            (replace-regexp-in-string "^.*:" "" gnus-newsgroup-name)))))
    (gnus-summary-copy-article n archive-name)))

You can now say ‘M-x my-archive-article’ in summary buffer to archive the article under the cursor in a nnml group. (Change nnml to your preferred back end)

Of course you can also make sure the cache is enabled by saying

(setq gnus-use-cache t)

then you only have to set either the tick or the dormant mark for articles you want to keep, setting the read mark will remove them from cache.