Re: how to delete a recalcitrant message in an IMAP mail group?

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

palmieri@math.washington.edu (John H. Palmieri) writes:

> I'm using gnus and nnimap to read my mail, and I'm having a small
> problem.  Gnus goes to my mail server, gets my mail, and then splits
> it into various mail groups, storing the mail from each group in a
> file on the local machine.

So how do you access the mail on your local machine?  Are you running
a IMAP server on your local machine?  And Gnus writes to files which
the IMAP server reads?  Maybe the IMAP server doesn't like this, I
believe the UoW server does not like non-c-client programs to write to
mailboxes it maintains.

> One of those files has a fairly old message in it, one which should
> have been expired, but wasn't.  When I enter that group and try to
> view all the old messages (C-u RET, then respond appropriately when
> it asks how many messages I want to retrieve), it takes a long time
> to open, and when it does, that old message is not visible, so I
> can't mark it for expiry or delete it.
> 
> Can I edit the actual mail file and just delete the offending message?
> Can I tell gnus to regenerate some database for that group?  How can I
> get rid of this message?
> 
> (The relevant mail group happens to be for the gnus mailing list, so
> as much as I cherish all of your messages, if I have to delete the
> whole thing and start over, it won't be a disaster.  I'm not even sure
> how to do that the right way, though.)

This depends on the backend used, but if it is nnimap (and you've
checked that your IMAP server doesn't have a problem with Gnus writing
to its files) maybe you could C-k the group, quit Gnus remove the NOV
cache and restart Gnus, then it should surely "work".

Of course, it would be good to find a reproducable way to get into the
broken state so we can prevent it from happening (save `G p' and NOV
cache and copy the stuff back to debug things).