Searching IMAP in Gnus

I spent a good few hours trying to convince Gnus to search my IMAP folders, under XEmacs. Googling turned up quite a lot of stuff, but most of it is wrong/irrelevant. In the end all I needed to do was:

• stick (require 'nnir) in my XEmacs init file

• add (nnir-search-engine imap) to my .gnus file, like so:

  (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
        '((nnimap "imap.lshift.net"
                  (nnimap-stream ssl)
                  (nnimap-authinfo-file "~/.authinfo")
                  (nnimap-nov-is-evil t)
                  (nnir-search-engine imap))))
  

• re-byte-compile the nnir.el file in the XEmacs package directory for gnus – on my system that is /usr/share/xemacs21/xemacs-packages/lisp/gnus. For some reason the nnir.elc that comes with the XEmacs gnus package is broken, so unless it gets produced afresh the use of nnir results in mysterious errors.

After that, marking groups in the group buffer and hitting G G prompts for a search string and proceeds to carry out the search. Nice.