Gnus Deleting and Expiring

Gnus

Deleting only really makes sense in mail groups. B DEL will do a real delete.

Expiring is something subtly different. Marking a message as expirable (i.e. with the E mark) means that the message is a candidate for deletion. It doesn't mean it will get deleted right away, it just means that it will be deleted in due course. Gnus provides two features to help with this: auto-expire and total-expire.

auto-expire preserves the meaning of all the marks. Expirable articles are the ones marked with E, and read one are the ones marked with R, O, etc. But auto-expire will arrange to press E for you when you select an article. The marks preserve their semantics (E means expirable, R means read, etc., but the hitting of the E key is automated.

total-expire, on the other hand, overloads, or changes, the meaning of the read flags (r, R, O, K, Y) to also mean expirable, in addition to E.