Being forced to deal with message numbers and frustrated

[Tony Lam <Tony.Lam+ding@eng.sun.com>]

Hi,

As long as people are talking about message number related problem and
solution, I'll throw in my problem :-)

I switched to Gnus from mailers that do not use message numbers,
naturally with Gnus I couldn't care less about message numbers. The
only place that I have to deal with message numbers is when I enter a
large group that I have to decide how many messages to read. (I don't
want to set gnus-large-newsgroup to nil because there are just too
many to read). In the following situations that I'm very frustrated by
the message numbers:

  * Number gap in cached messages can not be removed. When a messages
    group (I use nnfolder) has cached articles, I find
    respooling/moving/copying messages in the group do not touch
    cached articles, also cache groups do not support moving/copy
    themselves, thus there is no way to get rid of those huge gaps in
    message numbers within Gnus. Some people has reported moving
    articles does get rid of the number gaps in cached messages but I
    can't get it working for me. Is this intended behavior or a bug? I
    almost have to write a script to renumber cached messages outside
    Gnus and have Gnus rebuild the cache, but Gnus ought to handle
    this nicely.

  * Number in virtual group is frustrating. I have procmail to
    prioritize one of my high volume mailing lists into three folders,
    say foo.a, foo.b, foo.c. The reason is being that I only want to
    be notified of new messages in foo.a, so I can have xbuffy to only
    watch the spool file for foo.a. Sometimes I need to read all
    messages in foo.a, foo.b and foo.c, so I have a virtual group
    foo.v that consists of the above three. Now how does the number I
    give Gnus to read when entering the virtual group gets distributed
    within the component groups? Here is an example:

	group		message number range
	-----		--------------------
	foo.a		[1000-1200]
	foo.b		[1100-2500]
	foo.c		[3000-4000]

    When I tell Gnus to read read 300 messages from foo.v, does Gnus
    read 100 from each component group or just read the 300 messages
    with highest number from the virtual group? 

How does other people handle these problem? Any suggestion will be
appreciated. 

Tony