6.9.6 Agent Expiry

The Agent back end, nnagent, doesn’t handle expiry. Well, at least it doesn’t handle it like other back ends. Instead, there are special gnus-agent-expire and gnus-agent-expire-group commands that will expire all read articles that are older than gnus-agent-expire-days days. They can be run whenever you feel that you’re running out of space. Neither are particularly fast or efficient, and it’s not a particularly good idea to interrupt them (with C-g or anything else) once you’ve started one of them.

Note that other functions might run gnus-agent-expire for you to keep the agent synchronized with the group.

The agent parameter agent-enable-expiration may be used to prevent expiration in selected groups.

If gnus-agent-expire-all is non-nil, the agent expiration commands will expire all articles—unread, read, ticked and dormant. If nil (which is the default), only read articles are eligible for expiry, and unread, ticked and dormant articles will be kept indefinitely.

If you find that some articles eligible for expiry are never expired, perhaps some Gnus Agent files are corrupted. There’s are special commands, gnus-agent-regenerate and gnus-agent-regenerate-group, to fix possible problems.