Question about offline mode

[Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann)]

I never really understood what offline mode actually _is_.  Often the
connection to my IMAP server is down because I forget to (re-)start
the port forwarding.  Then Gnus asks me whether I want to switch the
server to offline mode.  And then it seemingly works well.

I was kind of hoping that offline mode is similar to unplugged mode,
but just for this single server.  Is this supposed to be the case?
So am I supposed to be able to enter groups from offline servers to
see all the articles that the agent has downloaded already?  And when
I try to post an article to the nnimap server that's offline, does
Gnus write to the nndraft:queue group?

When I try enter enter the nnimap+dtm:INBOX.misc group when the
server is offline, I get an error message along the lines of "no such
file or directory".  Is this normal?

If offline mode is not supposed to behave like unplugged mode,
wouldn't this be a useful feature?  Is it difficult to do?  Is
somebody willing to do it?

There might be thorny problems such as posting to an nntp server while
Gcc'ing to an nnimap server, and one of them is offline.  Then the
nndraft:queue group has to know which servers are still "to do".  I
wonder if there is a simple solution (such as: if at least one of the
servers is offline, just put the whole article in the queue).

kai
-- 
~/.signature is: umop ap!sdn    (Frank Nobis)