lost .newsrc.eld, invisible messages, unkillable nil group ...

[Doug Bagley <kof@deja.com>]

I'm experiencing a variety of problems with gnus (currently using
5.8.7), and I'd like to know if there is a remedy.  As background, I
use nnfolder as my primary backend and read occasional newsgroups as
foreign groups from various servers.

1) I have lost my .newsrc.eld a few times over the past year (Xemacs
crashes, or something similarly horrible).  I have sometimes had a
backup version I could use ... but sometimes not.  If gnus could
prevent .newsrc.eld lossage, or else recover more gracefully, that
would be really nice.  Right now, if I press "F" in Groups buffer, it
tells me that one new group has arrived, but it does not appear.

2) I have consistently had an unkillable group named "nil" at the top
level of my topics, and it's a bit annoying, but I haven't felt it
justified its own message, but I thought I'd throw it in here while
I'm at it.  I suppose this may be due to my feeble attempts at
.newsrc.eld recovery ...

3) But most worrisome to me is that I have on a number occasions, for
example, seen a "1" next to a group name in the Group buffer,
indicating a new mail, hit Return on the group name, and the number of
mails indicated goes to zero, and I don't get to read the new mail.
Yet it is there if I load that folder into a buffer (outside gnus).
Initially it occurred to me that my active file is busted, so I looked
in my ~/News/active file, and somehow some Incoming* files got in
there.  That shouldn't happen.  Then when I try to rebuild my active
file with nnfolder-generate-active-file, It croaked trying to build
some sent-mail.* folders, so I moved them out of my News directory, by
hand.  Anyway, the nnfolder-generate-active-file does not recover the
"invisible" emails.  They are in the folder, yet have become
permanently invisible to gnus.  In one folder that has 5 messages, and
the last message is "invisible", I see X-Gnus-Article-Number's like
this:

X-Gnus-Article-Number: 3   Wed Jun  9 21:15:10 1999
X-Gnus-Article-Number: 4   Mon Jun 26 17:48:28 2000
X-Gnus-Article-Number: 5   Wed Jul  5 07:19:33 2000
X-Gnus-Article-Number: 13   Wed Jul  5 07:16:26 2000
X-Gnus-Article-Number: 6   Thu Nov 30 08:51:14 2000

I don't know if that's part of the problem.

I really wish there were a function:
gnus-rebuild-all-meta-info-and-make-everything-right

I'd be happy to hear any suggestions, condolences, flames ...

Cheers,
Doug