In article <L6sxyodl5u/H089yn@islandnet.com>,
phigson@IslandNet.com (Peter Higson) wrote:
>
> If I run: Expire -o junk, nothing happens. That is to say, it goes
> through the motions and then tells me that 0 messages were expired.
I looked at the headers of the messages shown at the article selection
level in my 'junk' newsgroup. They had been posted to multiple news-
groups, among which 'junk' was explicitly identified as such.
Here is my hypothesis - there are TWO kinds of articles in 'junk':
1) Articles which explicitly state that they are for multiple
newsgroups, among which 'junk' is explicitly named. Let us
call these "shared" articles.
Yarn shows such articles on the article selection level lists of
ALL named newsgroups (e.g., BOTH in 'junk' and in soandso.misc).
I speculate that Yarn will 'expire -o' each article at the end
of THE LONGEST EXPIRATION TIME of _all_ the newsgroups to which
that article belongs. (Suppose expire for 'junk' is 1 day, but
expire for soandso.misc is 7 days -- an article which belongs to
both will take 7 days to expire, even though you viewed it from
'junk'.)
I believe Peter is encountering THIS KIND of article in 'junk'.
If I am correct, that is not a problem -- Yarn is working as
designed (because Peter specified: "since these articles are
ALSO in soandso.misc, keep them around for 7 days).
2) Articles which are routed by the Yarn import process to ONLY
'junk'. Let us call these "native" articles.
I believe that Yarn WILL apply the 'junk' expiration rules to
_these_ articles -- i.e., if expire for 'junk' is 1 day, that's
when these articles WILL expire.
A number of the responses to this topic dealt with: "when can't
Yarn find a proper newsgroup for the article, so it MUST stick
that article into 'junk' by default." I agree that when every-
thing works well, these should be few and far between. But in
my opinion, it was NOT this kind of an article that Peter was
talking about.
It is ironic that many articles which end up in 'junk' do so because
the person posting has followed netiquette. The ones in my 'junk'
selection list that I looked at all had many many groups named in
their Newsgroups: line -- too many to type in for each message.
Rather, the person posted a "response" (which copied the Newsgroups:
line from the original.) And if the original (for whatever reason)
had 'junk' in it (a commentary?), that is where Yarn puts it as well.
(Fields in an article's header can be viewed by toggling 'V'.)
mikus
p.s. When Peter does an 'expire -r', that overrides the "automatic"
expire and DOES (as he noted) remove that message from ALL the
article selection lists that the article had appeared on.