Re: Customizing group buffer - strange "number of total articles"

[Oleksandr Gavenko <gavenkoa@gmail.com>]

On 2013-04-15, Rainer M. Krug wrote:

> Hi
>
> I changed my group buffer format and added %t whic, according to the
> manual is
>
> ,----
> | `t'
> |   Total number of articles.
> `----
>
> but it gives me very strange numbers, e.g. in the Inbox of my gmail
> account (synced via offlineimap) I get nearly 10 times the number of
> actual messages. It is an local imap account. I checked the number of
> files in the Inbox folder of gmail, and it is also only about 10% of
> number shown for %t.
>
> I also read in the info manual that it is only an estimate and the
> liitations for nntp, but my backend is nnimap and I can therefore not
> compact.
>
> So my queestion is: is there a way of getting the number of mails from
> the nnimap backend in the group buffer?
>

(info "(gnus)FAQ 4-12")

Question 4.12
.............

The number of total messages in a group which Gnus displays in group
buffer is by far to high, especially in mail groups. Is this a bug?

Answer
......

No, that's a matter of design of Gnus, fixing this would mean
reimplementation of major parts of Gnus' back ends. Gnus thinks
"highest-article-number - lowest-article-number =
total-number-of-articles". This works OK for Usenet groups, but if you
delete and move many messages in mail groups, this fails. To cure the
symptom, enter the group via `C-u RET' (this makes Gnus get all
messages), then hit `M P b' to mark all messages and then say `B m
name.of.group' to move all messages to the group they have been in
before, they get new message numbers in this process and the count is
right again (until you delete and move your mail to other groups again).

-- 
Best regards!