gnus-group-read-group wants to retrieve ancient articles

[Brett Viren]

I'm using GNUS 5.13 with GNU emacs23.

I recently switched from using the pipeline: procmail->maildir->dovecot->nnimap
to one like: procmail->maildir->dovecot->offlineimap->dovecot->nnimap.

For offlineimap I use the mapping scheme to carry over Gnus marks.  But, I may
have done several syncs before I clued in to this issue.

Two problems have developed:

Now, when I hit ENTER on a group (gnus-group-read-group) I'm asked for:

  How many articles from nnimap+localhost:topic (default 20810)

The "topic" group may contain only a small handful of new articles and ~20k of
ancient (marked "O") ones.  Before the change, only the new articles (and any
articles marked "!") would be retrieved.  I can type in the number of articles I
want and sometimes this is okay, if a bit tedious.  But if the new mail is a
reply to an early thread it is not obvious how many articles must be retrieved
to pick up the new one.


The other problem, maybe related, is sometimes I will enter a group with, say,
one new article by doing ENTER 1 ENTER, read that article, exit the group and
now the group will have many "new" articles.  Reentering the group I find the
articles that were previously ancient are no lacking any marks.


I've searched around this list and elsewhere and find others that seem to have
the same sort of issues but no solutions.  There is some hints that offlineimap
may be reordering articles somehow but nothing conclusive.  

I hope someone has some suggestion.

Thanks,
-Brett.