Re: deleting last article in nnmh?

[David Z Maze <dmaze@MIT.EDU>]

gdt@work.lexort.com writes:

> I have an nnmh select method and a lot of groups, and can do most
> operations fine.
>
> When I enter a group nnmh:foo, and then do
>
>   M P a      # set process mark on all articles
>   B m   nnimap+my.domain:lists.foo
>
> the last article is not moved.   Trying to B m just that article
> fails, and G DEL also won't delete it.  (I've done B c and the rm -rf
> of the directory.)

This is a "feature" of nnmh.  In Gnus's newsreaderly view of the
world, article numbers need to be monotonically increasing, but in
nnmh the only state is the article numbers themselves.  I can't find a
mention of it in the manual, though.  nnmh.el defines a function
nnmh-deletable-article-p which is called from a couple of places with
a comment "We can never delete the last article in the group"; you
could conceivably set

;; Don't even think about setting this variable.  It does not exist.
;; Forget about it.  Uh-huh.  Nope.  Nobody here.  It's only bound
;; dynamically by certain functions in nndraft.
(defvar nnmh-allow-delete-final nil)

to t.

Unless you're actively using another MH-based mail client (MH-E,
scan/show/...) you might consider using nnml as a mail backend instead
of nnmh.  It has the same one-file-per-message format ("you can still
grep your mail") with an added .overview file that contains the
subjects and senders of each message, which makes scanning a folder a
lot faster.

  --dzm