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3.16 Saving Articles

Gnus can save articles in a number of ways. Below is the documentation for saving articles in a fairly straight-forward fashion (i.e., little processing of the article is done before it is saved). For a different approach (uudecoding, unsharing) you should use gnus-uu (see Decoding Articles).

For the commands listed here, the target is a file. If you want to save to a group, see the B c (gnus-summary-copy-article) command (see Mail Group Commands).

If gnus-save-all-headers is non-nil, Gnus will not delete unwanted headers before saving the article.

If the preceding variable is nil, all headers that match the gnus-saved-headers regexp will be kept, while the rest will be deleted before saving.

O o
o
Save the current article using the default article saver (gnus-summary-save-article).
O m
Save the current article in a Unix mail box (mbox) file (gnus-summary-save-article-mail).
O r
Save the current article in Rmail format (gnus-summary-save-article-rmail). This is mbox since Emacs 23, Babyl in older versions.
O f
Save the current article in plain file format (gnus-summary-save-article-file).
O F
Write the current article in plain file format, overwriting any previous file contents (gnus-summary-write-article-file).
O b
Save the current article body in plain file format (gnus-summary-save-article-body-file).
O h
Save the current article in mh folder format (gnus-summary-save-article-folder).
O v
Save the current article in a VM folder (gnus-summary-save-article-vm).
O p
|
Save the current article in a pipe. Uhm, like, what I mean is—Pipe the current article to a process (gnus-summary-pipe-output). If given a symbolic prefix (see Symbolic Prefixes), include the complete headers in the piped output. The symbolic prefix r is special; it lets this command pipe a raw article including all headers. The gnus-summary-pipe-output-default-command variable can be set to a string containing the default command and options (default nil).
O P
Save the current article into muttprint. That is, print it using the external program Muttprint. The program name and options to use is controlled by the variable gnus-summary-muttprint-program. (gnus-summary-muttprint).

All these commands use the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix). If you save bunches of articles using these functions, you might get tired of being prompted for files to save each and every article in. The prompting action is controlled by the gnus-prompt-before-saving variable, which is always by default, giving you that excessive prompting action you know and loathe. If you set this variable to t instead, you'll be prompted just once for each series of articles you save. If you like to really have Gnus do all your thinking for you, you can even set this variable to nil, which means that you will never be prompted for files to save articles in. Gnus will simply save all the articles in the default files.

You can customize the gnus-default-article-saver variable to make Gnus do what you want it to. You can use any of the eight ready-made functions below, or you can create your own.

gnus-summary-save-in-rmail
This is the default format, that used by the Rmail package. Since Emacs 23, Rmail uses standard mbox format. Before this, it used the Babyl format. Accordingly, this command writes mbox format since Emacs 23, unless appending to an existing Babyl file. In older versions of Emacs, it always uses Babyl format. Uses the function in the gnus-rmail-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-plain-save-name.
gnus-summary-save-in-mail
Save in a Unix mail (mbox) file. Uses the function in the gnus-mail-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-plain-save-name.
gnus-summary-save-in-file
Append the article straight to an ordinary file. Uses the function in the gnus-file-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-numeric-save-name.
gnus-summary-write-to-file
Write the article straight to an ordinary file. The file is overwritten if it exists. Uses the function in the gnus-file-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-numeric-save-name.
gnus-summary-save-body-in-file
Append the article body to an ordinary file. Uses the function in the gnus-file-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-numeric-save-name.
gnus-summary-write-body-to-file
Write the article body straight to an ordinary file. The file is overwritten if it exists. Uses the function in the gnus-file-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-numeric-save-name.
gnus-summary-save-in-folder
Save the article to an MH folder using rcvstore from the MH library. Uses the function in the gnus-folder-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-folder-save-name, but you can also use gnus-Folder-save-name, which creates capitalized names.
gnus-summary-save-in-vm
Save the article in a VM folder. You have to have the VM mail reader to use this setting.
gnus-summary-save-in-pipe
Pipe the article to a shell command. This function takes optional two arguments COMMAND and RAW. Valid values for COMMAND include:

Non-nil value for RAW overrides :decode and :headers properties (see below) and the raw article including all headers will be piped.

The symbol of each function may have the following properties:

:decode
The value non-nil means save decoded articles. This is meaningful only with gnus-summary-save-in-file, gnus-summary-save-body-in-file, gnus-summary-write-to-file, gnus-summary-write-body-to-file, and gnus-summary-save-in-pipe.
:function
The value specifies an alternative function which appends, not overwrites, articles to a file. This implies that when saving many articles at a time, gnus-prompt-before-saving is bound to t and all articles are saved in a single file. This is meaningful only with gnus-summary-write-to-file and gnus-summary-write-body-to-file.
:headers
The value specifies the symbol of a variable of which the value specifies headers to be saved. If it is omitted, gnus-save-all-headers and gnus-saved-headers control what headers should be saved.

All of these functions, except for the last one, will save the article in the gnus-article-save-directory, which is initialized from the SAVEDIR environment variable. This is ~/News/ by default.

As you can see above, the functions use different functions to find a suitable name of a file to save the article in. Below is a list of available functions that generate names:

gnus-Numeric-save-name
File names like ~/News/Alt.andrea-dworkin/45.
gnus-numeric-save-name
File names like ~/News/alt.andrea-dworkin/45.
gnus-Plain-save-name
File names like ~/News/Alt.andrea-dworkin.
gnus-plain-save-name
File names like ~/News/alt.andrea-dworkin.
gnus-sender-save-name
File names like ~/News/larsi.

You can have Gnus suggest where to save articles by plonking a regexp into the gnus-split-methods alist. For instance, if you would like to save articles related to Gnus in the file gnus-stuff, and articles related to VM in vm-stuff, you could set this variable to something like:

     (("^Subject:.*gnus\\|^Newsgroups:.*gnus" "gnus-stuff")
      ("^Subject:.*vm\\|^Xref:.*vm" "vm-stuff")
      (my-choosing-function "../other-dir/my-stuff")
      ((equal gnus-newsgroup-name "mail.misc") "mail-stuff"))

We see that this is a list where each element is a list that has two elements—the match and the file. The match can either be a string (in which case it is used as a regexp to match on the article head); it can be a symbol (which will be called as a function with the group name as a parameter); or it can be a list (which will be evaled). If any of these actions have a non-nil result, the file will be used as a default prompt. In addition, the result of the operation itself will be used if the function or form called returns a string or a list of strings.

You basically end up with a list of file names that might be used when saving the current article. (All “matches” will be used.) You will then be prompted for what you really want to use as a name, with file name completion over the results from applying this variable.

This variable is ((gnus-article-archive-name)) by default, which means that Gnus will look at the articles it saves for an Archive-name line and use that as a suggestion for the file name.

Here's an example function to clean up file names somewhat. If you have lots of mail groups called things like ‘nnml:mail.whatever’, you may want to chop off the beginning of these group names before creating the file name to save to. The following will do just that:

     (defun my-save-name (group)
       (when (string-match "^nnml:mail." group)
         (substring group (match-end 0))))

     (setq gnus-split-methods
           '((gnus-article-archive-name)
             (my-save-name)))

Finally, you have the gnus-use-long-file-name variable. If it is nil, all the preceding functions will replace all periods (‘.’) in the group names with slashes (‘/’)—which means that the functions will generate hierarchies of directories instead of having all the files in the top level directory (~/News/alt/andrea-dworkin instead of ~/News/alt.andrea-dworkin.) This variable is t by default on most systems. However, for historical reasons, this is nil on Xenix and usg-unix-v machines by default.

This function also affects kill and score file names. If this variable is a list, and the list contains the element not-score, long file names will not be used for score files, if it contains the element not-save, long file names will not be used for saving, and if it contains the element not-kill, long file names will not be used for kill files.

If you'd like to save articles in a hierarchy that looks something like a spool, you could

     (setq gnus-use-long-file-name '(not-save)) ; to get a hierarchy
     (setq gnus-default-article-saver
           'gnus-summary-save-in-file)          ; no encoding

Then just save with o. You'd then read this hierarchy with ephemeral nneething groups—G D in the group buffer, and the top level directory as the argument (~/News/). Then just walk around to the groups/directories with nneething.