fixed (was Re: how to delete a recalcitrant message in an IMAP mail group?)

[palmieri@math.washington.edu (John H. Palmieri)]

Well, I think I've fixed my problem.  Here's what I did: I hit "C-u RET"
to enter the group with as many messages visible as possible.  The old
message was not visible, but when I hit "P" at the top of the buffer,
I got a message like

  Can't find article 11398
  Couldn't go to article 11398

Hitting "P" again gave the same message, but with article number
11397.  So I looked at the file, and the one I wanted to get rid of
was message 8573, so I hit "P" about 2800 times.  Then the message
appeared, and I could mark it for expiry, and when I quit the group,
the message was deleted from the file.

(Of course, hitting "P" 2800 times was annoying, especially since it
doesn't use the prefix argument as a count, but I defined "P" to be a
keyboard macro, and ran it 2800 times...)

I don't know if I could have done this right from the start, or if,
say, updating to the most recent CVS helped, but the net result is,
I've gotten rid of the damn message.

Thanks for all of your suggestions.



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

> I posted this to gnu.emacs.gnus, and thought maybe I should post here,
> too.  I'm using
> 
> "Gnus/5.090004 (Oort Gnus v0.04) Emacs/21.0.106"
> 
> updated from cvs yesterday (the most recent entry in the ChangeLog is
> 2001-10-06).
> 
> 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.  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.)
> 
> -- 
> J. H. Palmieri                      
> Dept of Mathematics, Box 354350    mailto:palmieri@math.washington.edu
> University of Washington	   http://www.math.washington.edu/~palmieri/
> Seattle, WA 98195-4350
> 

-- 
J. H. Palmieri                      
Dept of Mathematics, Box 354350    mailto:palmieri@math.washington.edu
University of Washington	   http://www.math.washington.edu/~palmieri/
Seattle, WA 98195-4350