Re: Subscribing to nnimap folders that are subscribed on IMAP servers

[Ryan Kavanagh]

On Sun, Jul 31 2022, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
> Best to read the "New Groups" section of the Gnus manual: that will give
> you the background on `gnus-check-new-newsgroups' (you could also read
> its docstring), as well as methods of subscribing to new groups.
>
> Let us know if that doesn't clear it up!

gnus-check-new-newsgroups, if set, causes Gnus to call
gnus-find-new-newsgroups at startup, which then subscribes gnus to IMAP
folders according to the value of gnus-subscribe-newsgroup-method.

I tried running gnus-find-new-newsgroups with the method set to the
default (gnus-subscribe-zombies). Unfortunately, subscribing to a folder
in Gnus causes it to become subscribed *on the IMAP server itself* (I
believe thanks to nnimap-request-update-group-status). In particular,
gnus-find-new-newsgroups caused all of my IMAP folders to get marked as
subscribed on the server, which is definitely not what I
wanted. (Fortunately, I was able to restore my subscriptions from backup...)

I suppose I could set the method gnus-subscribe-interactively and
manually decide whether or not I want to subscribe to each folder in
gnus, but this would be very tedious: I have close to 200 folders spread
across my various IMAP accounts. I am not (IMAP-)subscribed to the vast
majority of these, and I do not want gnus to be subscribed to them
either.

Do you have any suggestions on how I can have gnus subscribe to just
those groups in the output of LSUB / LIST (SUBSCRIBED) [0]? I don't see
any functionality for doing so in the code base, so I suspect that this
might be a feature request...

Thanks,
Ryan

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9051#section-6.3.9.1

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