Feed retention

I just did an import into Opera Next, and noticed that I'm carrying multiple thousands of RSS articles in my database. I had assumed they were rolling off the back end all this time.

Is there some way to set the retention period. And to exempt an article from being deleted, say with a label?

I'm in 11.60/1185

Thanks.

Originally posted by paul1149:

Is there some way to set the retention period.

No, sorry.

Originally posted by paul1149:

And to exempt an article from being deleted, say with a label?

No, sorry.

If you want though, you can create a label named "Feeds Trash" or "Feeds Archive" and set it to "hide these messages from other views". Then, whenever you want to hide feed messages instead of deleting them, just apply that label instead of pressing delete.

Ok, that sounds like a workable solution.

Thanks.

Actually, that doesn't do what I need it to do. I went to my main Feed folder and deleted a lot of old stuff. The label I created and applied to stuff I wanted to retain, and which I set not to show in other views, did not protect its messages from being deleted from a general view that included Read messages.

Then, to make matters worse, in Trash, when trying to undelete those labeled messages, sorting by the Labels column only worked as a sub-sort under the Sender column. So I had to parse a whole lot of messages manually to make sure I didn't lose any.

I think this is a pretty big deal. Opera just spent about five minutes, using up to 77% processing power, to clear my Trash folder. I'm not sure how big a database I was carrying around - I couldn't find anything large in the appdata/local mail folder - but it must have been huge, and that must have affected performance.

There must be a whole lot of people using feeds, who have no idea that they are accumulating a huge db. And I don't see any message counter in Opera, even if I turn the Status Bar on (I use the popup status bar extension instead).

Originally posted by paul1149:

Actually, that doesn't do what I need it to do. I went to my main Feed folder and deleted a lot of old stuff. The label I created and applied to stuff I wanted to retain, and which I set not to show in other views, did not protect its messages from being deleted from a general view that included Read messages.

For every feed message list that you open, you have to click the wrench icon on the message list toolbar and uncheck "show hidden" so that the messages in the label with "hide these messages from other views" don't show in the list.

Originally posted by paul1149:

Opera just spent about five minutes, using up to 77% processing power, to clear my Trash folder.

Note that if you close the trash view, deleting will go a lot faster. The reason it's slower when the view is open is that Opera has to repaint the list every time Opera deletes a message.

Originally posted by paul1149:

There must be a whole lot of people using feeds, who have no idea that they are accumulating a huge db.

A lot of people just shift + del a feed message when they're done with it. That moves it to the trash and permanently deletes it so that it doesn't build up in the trash.

Originally posted by paul1149:

And I don't see any message counter in Opera,

Goto "shift + F12 -> buttons -> panels" and drag the ">>" button to the mail panel toolbar. Put it right before the "x". Then, click ">>" and you'll get an expanded view with counts and such.

Thanks for all that detailed information. I think the label idea will work using it.

What follows is some advocacy, not directed at you. No need to reply. It's meant for whoever will read it.

I used to incur some amount of wrath in the old opera newsgroups because I advocated for functionality that a broader section of the population wanted and could handle. For instance, I made a case for html mail (horrors!), and a relaxing of standards, if necessary, in order to get more pages to work.

While I appreciate the complexity at play here, and that Opera is to some extent a tech-oriented browser (a recent poll, fwiw, found that Opera users have the highest IQ), I would suggest that making database operations simpler would be a big plus toward popularizing Opera's feed reader. A very small segment is going to be willing to deal with the routine outlined in this thread. In order to purge articles, I would have to Hide Hidden labels first, then afterward Unhide them for normal use. People have lives and this is too much to expect them to deal with in many cases. I just cleaned up a computer where the guy had 4500 emails in his Deleted folder. He was carrying around 2.5GB of data every time he opened Outlook Express, on an old XP machine that could barely get out of bed.

A simple roll-off mechanism that deletes articles of a certain age, with a Keep flag to override, would go a long way here to keep things manageable, and perhaps Opera fast. I haven't measured boot-up time yet since I did the purge.

A follow-up. I just used the Hidden feature in conjunction with a label, Retain, to purge old feed items. It worked very well, judging from the item count. But I've seen no lessening in database size. I closed Opera, thinking that would trigger compacting, and heard the hard drive working, but no compacting was done? I went from over 8500 items to 700, from 21MB to ??.

A ha... It does help to empty Trash after a purge. Problem solved.

Originally posted by paul1149:

A ha... It does help to empty Trash after a purge. Problem solved.

Correct. Deleted messages still exist. They're just marked for deletion. You have to empty the trash to actual delete them. Likewise, a message hidden in a label isn't event marked for deletion. If you want the message really gone, you have to delete it to mark it for deletion and then empty the trash.