Subject: Clearing out newsgroups

From: Leo Scanlon <lscanlon@er>
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 13:56:04 -0400

I'm using Pine 3.91 on UNIX to maintain UseNet newsgroups. It seems to me 
that to clear out a specific newsgroup, I have to delete each item 
individually, with the D command. Is there some way to clear out a 
selected newsgroup in one fell swoop on Pine's main screen? 

Leo

---

From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 09:23:07 +0100 (BST)

What you say is true: when you have "finished with" a Usenet News article
you should "delete" it from the newsgroup using the "D" command.  (In
practice this means "delete it from the displayed list of articles; it
remains on the news server so that others can still read it.  Indeed you
can see it again yourself by using the "&" (Unexclude) command at a later
time.)

So its is better to use "D" as you read News, when you have finished with
an article.

If you want to perform a "catch-up" and mark all messages in a newsgroup
as read (or just a subset of them) you can do this using Pine's aggregate
commands.  These are three commands for applying a command to a set of
messages, be they in mail or news folders.

0.  Go to the Setup Configuration screen ("S" then "C" from the Main Menu)
    and select the "enable-aggregate-command-set" feature.  This will
    remain in effect, so you won't need to do this step in the future.

1.  Go to the Index screen of the mail folder/newsgroup in question.

2.  Choose a set of the messages by giving the Select (;) command followed
    by an option from the menu.  (Eg, ";A" will select all the messages)

3.  Apply a command to the selected set by giving the Apple (A) command
    followed by a command from the menu.  (Eg, "AD" will apply a delete
    command to the selected messages)

If you used the example commands (";AAD") then you will have marked all
the messages in the folder/newsgroup as deleted.  They will (permanently)
be deleted from a mail folder when it is closed, or hidden from the index
of a newsgroup when you next open the group.  You can force this to happen
without closing and re-opening the folder/newsgroup by giving the
Expunge/Exclude (X) command.

Select (;) and Apply (A) are two of the three aggregate commands.  The
thirs is Zoom (Z) which hides all unselected messages from the Index.  A
subsequent Zoom will redisplay them.  This is handy if you want to
concentrate on a particular set of messages.  For example, if you have a
lot of messages including many from the Pine-Info mailing list you can
concentrate on the latter by...

	;TT pine-info		...Select messages based on the Text To
				   field containing the string "pine-info"

	;BTC pine-info		...Select a Broader set based on the Text
				   CC field containing the string
				   "pine-info"

	Z			...Temporarily hide all unselected
				   messages

	$O			...Sort the messages into Ordered Subject
				   order

	^W^Y			...Go to the first message (then start
				   reading!)

This is actually quite a mouthful, but can become second nature (or be
programmed into a terminal emulator's function key!).  Each morning I use
the somewhat simpler command sequence to read my mail...

	;SN Z $O ^W^Y

(Whose description is left as an exercise to the reader -- I've always 
wanted to say after suffering it in Maths text books! :-) 

Cheers,

Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
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