need to recover from accidental gnus-summary-catchup-and-exit

["Bernhard Marx" <bernhard.marx@gmx.net>]

Hi,

while in summary buffer in gnus I accidentally hit c y and quit the
group. So all unread messages were marked as read.

The group was of the type nnml+private

How do I recover the information which e-mails were unread?

I exited xemacs (which I probably shouldn't  have done) by C-x C-c and
said save none. Then I made backup-copies of the ".newsrc*" files.

so what I have right now is:

-rw-r--r--  1 berny berny  1154 2005-11-02 08:09 .newsrc
-rw-r--r--  1 berny berny  1154 2005-11-01 17:01 .newsrc~
-rw-r--r--  1 berny berny 40641 2004-12-12 11:34 .newsrc-dribble~
-rw-r--r--  1 berny berny 40641 2005-11-02 19:28 .newsrc-dribble~.old
-rw-r--r--  1 berny berny 51122 2005-11-02 08:09 .newsrc.eld
-rw-r--r--  1 berny berny 51073 2005-11-01 17:01 .newsrc.eld~
-rw-r--r--  1 berny berny 51073 2005-11-02 19:29 .newsrc.eld~.old
-rw-r--r--  1 berny berny 51122 2005-11-02 19:29 .newsrc.eld.old
-rw-r--r--  1 berny berny  1154 2005-11-02 19:28 .newsrc~.old
-rw-r--r--  1 berny berny  1154 2005-11-02 19:28 .newsrc.old
-rw-------  1 berny berny 55138 2005-11-02 19:23 .nnmail-cache
-rw-------  1 berny berny 55138 2005-11-02 19:31 .nnmail-cache.old

What do I do now?

Which file contains the information about what message has already been
read?

Could I play back a copy of that file from a backup and just start
gnus? What happens to the mails/news that arrived in the meantime and
are in the ~/Maildir/ folder?

Thanks a lot,

         Berny