help with corrupted files; ticked articles missing

help with corrupted files; ticked articles missing

[Andrew B]

The partition containing my home directory filled up, and I cleared
space and exited gnus, though I am not sure in what order. 

At present, when I start gnus, the group that I was reading
when the disk filled up has a Group buffer line like this:
3:       2 /    1! 124410: nnimap+machinename:INBOX

but it should look more like this:
3:      80 /  997! 124410: nnimap+machinename:INBOX

When I enter the group, no matter how many articles I tell gnus to
fetch, it only shows those two unread articles. The read articles
are still on the server, gnus just won't fetch and display them.

Other groups behave normally; I can hit C-u RET and it will fetch
as many articles as I ask for. 

I have a backup from a few days ago that includes
-rw-r--r--  1 username username    250036 Jun 25 18:53 #.newsrc-dribble#
-rw-r--r--  1 username username    241532 May 19 14:45 #.newsrc-dribble#~
-rw-r--r--  1 username username    216738 Jan  5 04:08 .newsrc-dribble
-rw-r--r--  1 username username    201734 Jul  6  2022 .newsrc-dribble~
-rw-r--r--  1 username username    393157 Feb  8  2022 .newsrc.eld
-rw-r--r--  1 username username    392927 Feb  7  2022 .newsrc.eld~
-rw-r--r--  1 username username         0 Dec  6  2019 .newsrc

What can I do to recover my unread and ticked articles?
Are there any files besides .newsrc ones that I need to recover gnus state? 
I'm fine with having to re-read a few days of mail to get the state back
to what it was before the disk filled up.

Thanks very much for any assistance!

I will probably be offline for the next 3-4 days but will respond
to any questions as soon as I return.

  --akb

Re: help with corrupted files; ticked articles missing

[Eric Abrahamsen]

akb+lists.ding@mirror.to (Andrew B) writes:

> The partition containing my home directory filled up, and I cleared
> space and exited gnus, though I am not sure in what order. 
>
> At present, when I start gnus, the group that I was reading
> when the disk filled up has a Group buffer line like this:
> 3:       2 /    1! 124410: nnimap+machinename:INBOX
>
> but it should look more like this:
> 3:      80 /  997! 124410: nnimap+machinename:INBOX
>
> When I enter the group, no matter how many articles I tell gnus to
> fetch, it only shows those two unread articles. The read articles
> are still on the server, gnus just won't fetch and display them.

With nnimap groups, it can often work to use "M-g" on the group in
question, which can help refresh Gnus' understanding of read counts from
the server. That's the first thing I'd try.

Re: help with corrupted files; ticked articles missing

[Andrew B]

When I do M-g on an nnimap group affected by gnus not having exited
properly, after M-g the status line is:
   3:      30 /  977! 124410: nnimap+servername:INBOX

When I enter the group, it asks how many articles to fetch, defaulting to 1007.
If I tell it "sure, fetch 1007 articles" by hitting RET, it only gets 31,
displaying only one ticked message plus the 30 unread ones.
Doing nothing but entering the group and exiting again the status line becomes:
   3:      30 /    1! 124410: nnimap+servername:INBOX 

It seems like maybe the IMAP server knows about the ticked articles but
gnus does not? But somehow when gnus enters the group its
incorrect/corrupted view gets reasserted?

If I want to hand edit things to fix them, is there documentation on the
.newsrc.eld and .newsrc-dribble file formats? Are there any other files
I need to concern myself with to try to fix things?

  --any assistance appreciated!
  --akb

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
> akb+lists.ding@mirror.to (Andrew B) writes:
>
>> The partition containing my home directory filled up, and I cleared
>> space and exited gnus, though I am not sure in what order. 
>>
>> At present, when I start gnus, the group that I was reading
>> when the disk filled up has a Group buffer line like this:
>> 3:       2 /    1! 124410: nnimap+machinename:INBOX
>>
>> but it should look more like this:
>> 3:      80 /  997! 124410: nnimap+machinename:INBOX
>>
>> When I enter the group, no matter how many articles I tell gnus to
>> fetch, it only shows those two unread articles. The read articles
>> are still on the server, gnus just won't fetch and display them.
>
> With nnimap groups, it can often work to use "M-g" on the group in
> question, which can help refresh Gnus' understanding of read counts from
> the server. That's the first thing I'd try.

Re: help with corrupted files; ticked articles missing

[RL]

akb+lists.ding@mirror.to (Andrew B) writes:

> The partition containing my home directory filled up, and I cleared

> What can I do to recover my unread and ticked articles?
> Are there any files besides .newsrc ones that I need to recover gnus
> state?

I had a similar situation - i found the 'active' file in the nnml server
had been emptied and this seems to have caused issues opening nnml
groups. Running `M-x nnml-generate-nov-databases' seems to have fixed it,
but i dont know if this is good or bad advice

Re: help with corrupted files; ticked articles missing

[Andrew B]

RL <richard.lewis.debian@googlemail.com> writes:
> akb+lists.ding@mirror.to (Andrew B) writes:
>
>> The partition containing my home directory filled up, and I cleared
>
>> What can I do to recover my unread and ticked articles?
>> Are there any files besides .newsrc ones that I need to recover gnus
>> state?
>
> I had a similar situation - i found the 'active' file in the nnml server
> had been emptied and this seems to have caused issues opening nnml
> groups. Running `M-x nnml-generate-nov-databases' seems to have fixed it,
> but i dont know if this is good or bad advice

Thanks! This put me on the right track. I don't use nnml, but there
were files in the ~/News directory causing the problem; if I have time
I'll sort out what exactly, but meanwhile I just renamed the direcoty
contents and let gnus recreate what it needed. 

Meanwhile, if there's a wishlist, I feel like this sort of thing should
not ideally be possible; with nnimap if M-g shows me there are
1000 ticked articles and entering the group only shows 1, or if M-g
shows 124000 articles, but entering the group refuses to retrieve more
than a couple dozen, I feel like there could be some kind of internal
consistency check that at least informs the user that there's a problem,
and ideally allows for something like overwriting corrupt info in
either .newsrc.eld or ~/News with info from the imap server...