Closely related to article caching, we have persistent articles. In fact, it’s just a different way of looking at caching, and much more useful in my opinion.
Say you’re reading a newsgroup, and you happen on to some valuable gem that you want to keep and treasure forever. You’d normally just save it (using one of the many saving commands) in some file. The problem with that is that it’s just, well, yucky. Ideally you’d prefer just having the article remain in the group where you found it forever; untouched by the expiry going on at the news server.
This is what a persistent article is—an article that just won’t be deleted. It’s implemented using the normal cache functions, but you use two explicit commands for managing persistent articles:
Make the current article persistent (gnus-cache-enter-article).
Remove the current article from the persistent articles
(gnus-cache-remove-article). This will normally delete the
article.
Both these commands understand the process/prefix convention.
To avoid having all ticked articles (and stuff) entered into the cache,
you should set gnus-use-cache to passive if you’re just
interested in persistent articles:
(setq gnus-use-cache 'passive)