Re: GNUS, IMAP, and slowness (that should be easy fixable?)

[tbennett@nvidia.com (Tony E. Bennett)]

klarlund@research.att.com (Nils Klarlund) writes:

> I would like to use GNUS in the way that standard mail readers work.
> In particular, they show all mail in the group (= mail folder),
> whether read or unread, and an operation check-mail updates the group
> in unit time, adding new mail (i.e. in time that is not proportional
> to the number of mail in the group, but a constant).
>
> In GNUS there are only two options for updating mail as far as I can
> tell:
>
> 	(gnus-summary-rescan-group t)
>
> which does the job except that the time it takes to execute this
> command is proportional to the size of the group with imap.  (The time
> is spent fetching headers according to the message printed by GNUS.)
> The other option is
>
> 	(gnus-summary-rescan-group)
>
> which is much faster since it fetches the headers only for all unread
> mail (which happens to include new mail).  This method is also
> deficient since it does not limit itself to new mail.  Worse, and at
> least this should be fixable I would imagine, all unread mail in the
> group is now not shown anymore.  This behavior is inconsistent with
> standard user interfaces of mail readers (and not workable in practice
> I believe).

I had some of the same issues.  This is what I bind to "g" in
summary mode.  I do not have it automatically running, however.

(defun my-gnus-summary-rescan-group (&optional heavy)
  "Rescan group; go to first unread msg."
  (interactive "P")
  (if heavy
      ;; use heavy handed one which updates the server's "read" article list
      (gnus-summary-rescan-group)

    ;; lightweight, doesn't redo the summary buffer

    ;; First, update server
    (gnus-summary-update-info)
    (gnus-summary-insert-new-articles))

  ;; select new article or last article, if no unread articles
  (or (gnus-summary-first-unread-subject)
      (progn
        (goto-char (point-max))
        (previous-line 1))))


-- 
--tony