Gnus and mail don't work for me...

Gnus and mail don't work for me...

[Tassilo Horn]

Hi all,

because of Lars' thirst for action, I thought I might express why Gnus
as it is right now doesn't work for me with respect to handling mail.

I've setup my 2 IMAP accounts in Gnus again with the agent enabled.  So
far, it works quite nicely and much more speedy than with the old
nnimap.  Good job, Lars!  :-)

Ok, now to my problem:

On one of my IMAP accounts I deleted some folder that had no new mail in
the last 3 years.  I moved all the mails in that folder (~500) into my
INBOX before.

The problem now is that when entering my INBOX with C-u 100 RET, I do
get the latest 100 mails according to article number (which are mails
from 2007!), but what I really like to have is the latest 100 mails
according to Date: header.  I guess that's what anyone would expect.  To
get that result, I now have to do something like C-u 600 RET (100 latest
articles plus the 500 old ones from the folder merge) and then restrict
by recency.

Also, C-u 100 RET should open a summary with exactly 100 articles
although I may have deleted/moved 99 of the last articles according to
article number...

I know these are all fundamental issues with Gnus working with article
numbers.  But are there any chances to overcome that limitation, because
the assumption of article numbers corresponding to recency simply
doesn't hold for mail?

Bye,
Tassilo

Re: Gnus and mail don't work for me...

[Julien Danjou]

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On Tue, Sep 21 2010, Tassilo Horn wrote:

> I know these are all fundamental issues with Gnus working with article
> numbers.  But are there any chances to overcome that limitation, because
> the assumption of article numbers corresponding to recency simply
> doesn't hold for mail?

I don't know for sure, but I don't think it's doable without downloading
all articles headers, sorting them by date, and then showing only the
latest 100.

Which is the same as downloading all article with C-u RET RET and
sorting them by date.

Gnus is the only MUA I know able to dowload only the latest N articles.
All others download all the articles.

So you may are expecting something from Gnus that is not doable at all,
and that no other MUA does for a good reason. :)

-- 
Julien Danjou
// ᐰ <julien@danjou.info>   http://julien.danjou.info

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Re: Gnus and mail don't work for me...

[Tassilo Horn]

On Tuesday 21 September 2010 12:25:39 Julien Danjou wrote:

Hi Julien,

> > I know these are all fundamental issues with Gnus working with
> > article numbers.  But are there any chances to overcome that
> > limitation, because the assumption of article numbers corresponding
> > to recency simply doesn't hold for mail?
> 
> I don't know for sure, but I don't think it's doable without
> downloading all articles headers, sorting them by date, and then
> showing only the latest 100.

I don't really care about *how* it's done, at least for now.  If it has
to download all headers (once!), that's fine with me.

Hm, thinking about that: When the agent is on, Gnus saves .overviews for
my mail folders.  Those are sorted according my custom config
(gnus-thread-sort-functions), which is first by total score, then by
date, then by number, and for mail groups (except mailinglists) I don't
use scoring.

Would it be possible to use the overview files to only get the "latest"
100 articles, where "latest" means "according to my sorting"?

Bye,
Tassilo

Re: Gnus and mail don't work for me...

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:

> Would it be possible to use the overview files to only get the "latest"
> 100 articles, where "latest" means "according to my sorting"?

Uhm...  well, you could force Gnus to download all the headers all the
time, apply a sort, and then restrict the summary buffer to a subset of
the messages.  But it sounds like it would be slow and not generally
very useful.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: Gnus and mail don't work for me...

[Tassilo Horn]

On Tuesday 21 September 2010 17:56:24 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote:

> Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:
> > Would it be possible to use the overview files to only get the
> > "latest" 100 articles, where "latest" means "according to my
> > sorting"?
> 
> Uhm...  well, you could force Gnus to download all the headers all the
> time, apply a sort, and then restrict the summary buffer to a subset
> of the messages.

Hm, nope, my I idea was a bit different.  I've thought that it could be
possible to have something like an overview file which contains lines
for all articles in a group with the user-defined sorting.  Generation
of that file of course requires fetching all headers, but only once.
Updates could then be done incrementally [1].  Then C-u [-]100 RET would
simply mean use the top/bottom 100 lines of that file for the summary.

Well, at least that's the idea.

Bye,
Tassilo
__________
[1] Don't ask me how!

Re: Gnus and mail don't work for me...

[Jouni K. Seppänen]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:
>
>> Would it be possible to use the overview files to only get the "latest"
>> 100 articles, where "latest" means "according to my sorting"?
>
> Uhm...  well, you could force Gnus to download all the headers all the
> time, apply a sort, and then restrict the summary buffer to a subset of
> the messages.  But it sounds like it would be slow and not generally
> very useful.

There is the SORT extension for sorting on the server:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5256.txt

I don't know how widely it is implemented.

-- 
Jouni K. Seppänen
http://www.iki.fi/jks

Re: Gnus and mail don't work for me...

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Jouni K. Seppänen <jks@iki.fi> writes:

> There is the SORT extension for sorting on the server:
>
> http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5256.txt

How many IMAP RFCs are there, anyway?  :-)

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: Gnus and mail don't work for me...

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>:

> How many IMAP RFCs are there, anyway?  :-)

Millions and millions!