Comment 1 for bug 1208813

The message "492 stale deleted messages are ignored" is confusing. They are not necessarily marked as "stale", just the UID's were fond to be invalid, or perhaps the UID's were nil. Moreover, the messages have now been expunged. So, the present tense is misleading.

V C eval <RET> (null (vm-imap-uid-of vm-virtual-message)) <RET>

should be able to show the messages with null UID's. However vm-vs-eval is not part of standard VM at present; it is in vm-avirtual package.