The Agent work with any Gnus back end, including nnimap. However, since there are some conceptual differences between NNTP and IMAP, this section (should) provide you with some information to make Gnus Agent work smoother as a IMAP Disconnected Mode client.
The first thing to keep in mind is that all flags (read, ticked, etc)
are kept on the IMAP server, rather than in .newsrc
as is the
case for nntp. Thus Gnus need to remember flag changes when
disconnected, and synchronize these flags when you plug back in.
Gnus keep track of flag changes when reading nnimap groups under the
Agent by default. When you plug back in, by default Gnus will check if
you have any changed any flags and ask if you wish to synchronize these
with the server. This behavior is customizable with
gnus-agent-synchronize-flags
.
If gnus-agent-synchronize-flags
is nil
, the Agent will
never automatically synchronize flags. If it is ask
, the
default, the Agent will check if you made any changes and if so ask if
you wish to synchronize these when you re-connect. If it has any other
value, all flags will be synchronized automatically.
If you do not wish to automatically synchronize flags when you
re-connect, this can be done manually with the
gnus-agent-synchronize-flags
command that is bound to J Y
in the group buffer by default.
Some things are currently not implemented in the Agent that you'd might expect from a disconnected IMAP client, including:
Technical note: the synchronization algorithm does not work by "pushing"
all local flags to the server, but rather incrementally update the
server view of flags by changing only those flags that were changed by
the user. Thus, if you set one flag on a article, quit the group and
re-select the group and remove the flag; the flag will be set and
removed from the server when you "synchronize". The queued flag
operations can be found in the per-server flags
file in the Agent
directory. It's emptied when you synchronize flags.
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