confusion about gnus agent and downloading only selected articles

[Peter Petersen]

Hi,

I am slowly trying to familiarize myself again with gnus and its agent
mode (after years of using Forte Agent, via Wine).

What I don't get, is:
How can I tell gnus to only download all the marked (with %) articles (or
threads) in all the groups?

So far the situation is like this:
If I enter a group in plugged mode and select some of the articles
and/or threads and then do a J-u gnus only downloads the article bodies
of the marked articles/threads. Okay, fine...

If I have marked articles not only in _one_ group, but in all of my
subscribed groups, the situation is different:

If I am in the newsgroups summary buffer and do a J-s gnus does not only
download all the marked articles, but instead it downloads all the
article bodies in all the groups! Something that I highly dislike when I
am on dial-up (when my DSL is down, for instance).

So I tried to avoid J-s and use J-u instead, by putting process marks to
all the group names and then doing M-& in order to use a command on all
of these groups: the command is J-u.
Again: All the article bodies in all groups are being downloaded!?


Looks like using J-s or J-u from the _summary buffer_ (instead of from
within the group with its header listings) doesn't respect my marked
articles, but blindly downloads everything.

Only when I am within a group and _see_ the download marks (%), a J-u
respects my selection and only downloads what I have marked!

But since I would have to do this for each and every group, this could
be a lengthy and rather uncomfortable process.


Is there no easier way? Or am I missing something?


My agent default category has a predicate of "short", but I also tried
"false", with the same results.

Gnus v5.10.6
GNU Emacs 21.3.1



thanks
Peter