Hi Jorge and Eric,

Thanks for the feedback!  I'm glad to know I'm not the only one.

"Jorge A. Alfaro-Murillo" <jorge.alfaro-murillo@yale.edu> writes:

> Andreas Schwab writes:
>
>> On Jun 04 2018, Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> wrote: 
>>
>>> Is it normal for gnus-summary-insert-old-articles to add no
>>> articles to the summary buffer even though it says that some old
>>> articles are available? 
>>
>> Perhaps due to gaps in the article numbers.
>
> Yeah, that happens to me with gmail. I think that the numbers are the
> ones in "All Mail", that is why there are gaps in "Inbox" or other
> folders.

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> It does look like `gnus-summary-insert-old-articles' calculates the old
> article numbers to request without consulting the backend.

How might I begin to troubleshoot to see if this is a bug on Gmail's
side, within my local Gnus configuration, or within Gnus itself?  I'm
mainly just curious, since like I said I can just request arbitrarily
many articles to eventually get the older ones.

I've noticed this behavior occurs not only with Gmail but also with
other IMAP email providers, as well.  Anecdotally, today I observed
using a non-Gmail IMAP service that when I requested 10 old articles, I
got less than 10, and when I requested 10 again, I got even more
articles (but still less than 10).  It's quite curious.

-- 
Chris