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

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

[Bernhard Marx]

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

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

[Bernhard Marx]

Bernhard Marx schrieb:

Problem solved...

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

Next time I will know, that a simple M-x gnus-undo will undo the
catchup. Simple if you know it.

> 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.

This I shouldn't have done. Made things only more complicated it seems.
As far as I can tell, the list of actions that were done is lost this
way and so can't be undone after restarting xemacs and gnus.

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

In my case it turned out to be
~/Mail/groupname/.marks

> 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?

I simply copied the backup-file over the new one.

Because the older file does not contain the information that the
E-mails were read Gnus displays them as unread. Seems all messages for
which there is no information are displayed as unread. Beware though,
that you will loose any information about replies, forwards and
tick-marks you have done since your last backup. The mails themselves
should be there though.

    Berny