Gnus IMAP+Agent

[Sailesh Krishnamurthy <seesignature@cs.berkeley.edu>]

Dear Gnusers

I use Gnus on XEmacs with the following versions

  XEmacs 21.4 (patch 15) 
  Gnus v5.10.6

I've been using nnimap for the last 3.5 years without any
problems. Recently I decided that it was time to use the Agent - my
mail folders have gotten big enough that things are getting very slow
(particularly deleting and moving mail between folders). 

I read the instructions and I _think_ I've done things correctly ...

    ;;; Make Gnus into an offline newsreader.
    (setq gnus-agent t)
    (setq gnus-agent-enable-expiration 'DISABLE)
    (add-hook 'gnus-select-article-hook 'gnus-agent-fetch-selected-article)

My problem is that I just can't seem to find out how to download my
entire IMAP folder set into a local cache. I'd love to do that for
speed and to be able to index and search my mail. 

Is there some magic way in which I can start things and go eat dinner
while Gnus essentially replicates my entire IMAP email ?

My googling unfortunately only produced a post from Paul Stodghill who
supplies a patch that makes this possible .. this is circa 2001

    http://tinyurl.com/6yvey

I don't really know (or think) that the patch will work in the more or
less recent version of Gnus that I'm using. 

(I tried both "J u" and "J s" but got nowhere)

Any ideas ? 

-- 
Pip-pip
Sailesh
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sailesh