7.9.7 Agent Regeneration

The local data structures used by nnagent may become corrupted due to certain exceptional conditions. When this happens, nnagent functionality may degrade or even fail. The solution to this problem is to repair the local data structures by removing all internal inconsistencies.

For example, if your connection to your server is lost while downloaded articles into the agent, the local data structures will not know about articles successfully downloaded prior to the connection failure. Running gnus-agent-regenerate or gnus-agent-regenerate-group will update the data structures such that you don’t need to download these articles a second time.

The command gnus-agent-regenerate will perform gnus-agent-regenerate-group on every agentized group. While you can run gnus-agent-regenerate in any buffer, it is strongly recommended that you first close all summary buffers.

The command gnus-agent-regenerate-group uses the local copies of individual articles to repair the local NOV(header) database. It then updates the internal data structures that document which articles are stored locally. An optional argument will mark articles in the agent as unread.