AAACK I lost all but 2 entries of the Mail/active file

AAACK I lost all but 2 entries of the Mail/active file

[reader]

Don't know how it happened but I lost dozens of entries in the
Mail/active file... the groups view shows dozens of asterisks in front
of many many nnml groups.

Short of rolling back to a nifty backup file I DO NOT have. What would
be the next best option?

If the answer is to recreate the `active' file I could use some
coaching on how to proceed.

One example from my exiting active file:

paypal 53 3 y

According to some of the `INN' documentation those entires stand for

     <newsgroup> <high> <low> <status>

The `high' and `low' refers to message numbers in the group


The `y' is one of 5 or 6 possible characters that can tell different
things about the group:

The `y' char in particular means "Local postings and articles from
peers are allowed".

And will appear on all or nearly all the files.  It may be kind of
meaningless in gnus. 

Since the messages are all still in the nnml directories, I can look
thru them and get those `high' and `low' message numbers for the
active file with a little work.

So is generating the active file by hand the best way to go?

Re: AAACK I lost all but 2 entries of the Mail/active file

[Eric Abrahamsen]

reader <hput3@fastmail.fm> writes:

> Don't know how it happened but I lost dozens of entries in the
> Mail/active file... the groups view shows dozens of asterisks in front
> of many many nnml groups.
>
> Short of rolling back to a nifty backup file I DO NOT have. What would
> be the next best option?
>
> If the answer is to recreate the `active' file I could use some
> coaching on how to proceed.
>
> One example from my exiting active file:
>
> paypal 53 3 y
>
> According to some of the `INN' documentation those entires stand for
>
>      <newsgroup> <high> <low> <status>
>
> The `high' and `low' refers to message numbers in the group
>
>
> The `y' is one of 5 or 6 possible characters that can tell different
> things about the group:
>
> The `y' char in particular means "Local postings and articles from
> peers are allowed".
>
> And will appear on all or nearly all the files.  It may be kind of
> meaningless in gnus. 
>
> Since the messages are all still in the nnml directories, I can look
> thru them and get those `high' and `low' message numbers for the
> active file with a little work.
>
> So is generating the active file by hand the best way to go?

All the messages are still there, so don't panic! At worst you've lost
the marks that Gnus had stored about those messages, but perhaps not
even those. I can't guess how this happened, but you shouldn't have to
recreate anything by hand. That said, maybe do make a backup of the
messages until you've got this sorted!

The groups with asterisks in front of them most likely means that this
is a group that Gnus has information for, but now can't find a
correspondent for in the "real world", outside of its own files. If you
run "M-g" on one of these groups, does it fix it?

If not, try going into the *Server* buffer (with "^"), then entering the
nnml server in question, and re-subscribing to those groups. If you
jiggle it around enough, it ought to start working again.

Eric

Re: AAACK I lost all but 2 entries of the Mail/active file

[reader]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
> All the messages are still there, so don't panic! At worst you've lost
> the marks that Gnus had stored about those messages, but perhaps not
> even those. I can't guess how this happened, but you shouldn't have to
> recreate anything by hand. That said, maybe do make a backup of the
> messages until you've got this sorted!

Thanks for the kindness of not asking ....  

<snip'ed The excellent help>

Thanks