Re: nnimap usage model

[Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com>]

David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com> writes:

> Thanks for your reply, Kevin
>
> Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com> writes:
>
>> The agent has three faces and a format specifier to highlight articles
>> that have NOT been downloaded.  The faces appear by default while the
>> format specifier must be added through customization.
>
> Hmm, I'll see if I can track that down.  Could you elaborate on what
> you mean by "appear by default", and where the customization for the
> format specifier can be found?

The variable gnus-summary-highlight controls how an article is
highlighted in the summary.  It contains a list of conditions and
faces over which Gnus will iterate to the first true condition
then select that face.  If you don't want to use faces to highlight
the undownloaded articles, you should customize gnus-summary-highlight
to delete the three cons cells that refer to the
gnus*undownloaded-face.

>
>> If you don't like using colors to indicate the undownloaded articles,
>> you can customize gnus-summary-highlight.  Just remove the three cons
>> cells that refer to gnus*undownloaded-face.
>>
>> If you want to use +/- markers you can add %O to gnus-summary-line-format.
>
> I'll consider that as an alternative; it might be preferable.
>
>> You're the first to describe newly downloaded articles as being marked
>> as "ancient".  
>
> I think I was mis-describing the marks; the face used for ancient
> articles looks a lot like the one used for un-downloaded articles on
> NTEmacs when you don't use Courier New :(

You can change the characters used by customizing
gnus-undownloaded-mark and gnus-downloaded-mark.  The +/- were
selected for historical reasons.

>
>> Also that those articles are being highlighted.  
>
> I don't think I ever mentioned the word "highlighted."
>
>> Try downloading the latest gnus-agent.el or set
>> gnus-agent-mark-unread-after-downloaded to t.
>
> Well, now I'm seeing some other bizzarre behavior.  My relevant
> settings are now:
>
>     gnus-check-new-newsgroups nil
>     gnus-total-expirable-newsgroups "INBOX"
>     gnus-agent-cache t            ; see NOTE below
>     gnus-agent t
>     gnus-agent-consider-all-articles t
>     gnus-agent-expire-days 36500
>     gnus-agent-mark-unread-after-downloaded t
>
> I was looking at my INBOX and I decided to see how many read messages
> it was keeping, so I did `/ o 50' and the old messages appeared, but
> suddenly all the messages which were marked already-read were now
> marked undownloaded.  Does anybody have an explanation for that?

Nope.  That's not something that I'm able to reproduce here.

> NOTE: also, I'm not really sure what I'm getting from
> gnus-agent-cache.  All I can find in the documentation says "the agent
> is also a big cache!"  Can somebody explain what that means?

It is an internal switch for temporarily disabling the agent.  You
should leave it set to t.  Gnus will bind it to nil as appropriate
times.

Kevin