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

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

[John H. Palmieri]

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

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

[Kai Großjohann]

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

> 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?

Is the message really in the file?  Hm.  Strange.

It could also be that you have some cached message.  Type `Y c' to
show cached messages.

kai
-- 
GNU/Linux provides a nice `poweroff' command, but where is `poweron'?

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

[John H. Palmieri]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> palmieri@math.washington.edu (John H. Palmieri) writes:
> 
>> 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?
> 
> Is the message really in the file?  Hm.  Strange.
> 
> It could also be that you have some cached message.  Type `Y c' to
> show cached messages.

"No cached articles for this group"

By the way, if I open the file with `G f' in the group buffer, the
message is visible.

-- 
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

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

[Kai Großjohann]

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

> By the way, if I open the file with `G f' in the group buffer, the
> message is visible.

I see.  Look at its Message-ID -- does that occur twice, perhaps?
This would explain why one copy isn't shown.

kai
-- 
GNU/Linux provides a nice `poweroff' command, but where is `poweron'?

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

[John H. Palmieri]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> palmieri@math.washington.edu (John H. Palmieri) writes:
> 
>> By the way, if I open the file with `G f' in the group buffer, the
>> message is visible.
> 
> I see.  Look at its Message-ID -- does that occur twice, perhaps?
> This would explain why one copy isn't shown.

No, the Message-ID is unique.  I have even deleted (using `B DEL') all
of the visible messages in the group, leaving that single message in
the file.  It still doesn't become visible in the Summary buffer (in
fact, I can't enter the summary buffer, because gnus thinks there are
no articles in the group).

-- 
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

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

[ShengHuo ZHU]

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

> Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:
> 
>> palmieri@math.washington.edu (John H. Palmieri) writes:
>> 
>>> By the way, if I open the file with `G f' in the group buffer, the
>>> message is visible.
>> 
>> I see.  Look at its Message-ID -- does that occur twice, perhaps?
>> This would explain why one copy isn't shown.
> 
> No, the Message-ID is unique.  I have even deleted (using `B DEL') all
> of the visible messages in the group, leaving that single message in
> the file.  It still doesn't become visible in the Summary buffer (in
> fact, I can't enter the summary buffer, because gnus thinks there are
> no articles in the group).

Maybe cache or agent hide the article. You may evaluate
      (setq gnus-use-cache nil gnus-agent nil)
then try `M-g C-u RET' to enter the group.

ShengHuo

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

[Simon Josefsson]

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).

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

[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