Re: Strange article sorting from Gmail

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net> writes:

> Aloha everyone,
>
> I came across a strange thing with gnus and gmail.  I've been
> using gnus to fetch mail directly from gmail for years.
> Things work as expected at the 99% level, at times with some
> effort.
>
> However something changed two days ago that I can't
> understand.  It was only in my gmail "Sent Mail" folder and
> nowhere else.
>
> Everything was fine until that morning Sent Mail, when
> fetched, showed a few recent sent messages, and then skipped
> over several thousand of them and showed messages from 2021 on
> back.  Now, if I did /o and told it to fetch all 28,000 or so
> headers, everything would then show up.
>
> I checked the usual suspects.  I was using (display . all).  I
> was using gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-date in the variable
> gnus-thread-sort-function.  I tried adding (not
> gnus-thread-sort-by-number) to no avail.
>
> Further research appeared to indicate that gnus fetches by the
> IMAP server's ID number, and the numbers on the gmail server
> appeared to have all of a sudden gotten out of sync with the
> email dates.  So if I fetched just a few headers, I would get
> the odd behavior described.  If I fetched all the headers,
> gnus would be able to sort all the mail in proper date order.
> In other words gnus couldn't sort headers it didn't have.
>
> There's nothing to do about this as it apparently is some sort
> of gmail problem.  On the web interface, of course, everything
> sorts as expected, but that's not what I care to use.
>
> What I did was move a few thousand emails out of Sent Mail and
> into the gmail archive.  In effect what this does is remove
> the Sent Mail label.  The mail still remains in gmails All
> Mail label.  Eventually I got to something that was more or
> less date sequential.
>
> The reason I'm posting here is to ask if anyone else has seen
> strange things like this when using gnus and gmail.  I'm not
> asking for a solution as it appears there is none, at least
> not on the gnus side.

Well that sounds very annoying! I suppose you already tried "M-g" to
request a new scan of this group in particular?

I do wish I understood what Gmail is doing there, to reset the article
numbers, and if there were anything Gnus could do automatically to
handle it more gracefully.