i don't know why the gap limit increased to 252 rather than 250. does it say the following when you view the file in notepad:
Or are you counting the addresses manually and determining the gap limit that way?
To answer your second question the gap limit is the number of unused addresses, beyond the index of the last used address in your wallet, that electrum keeps track off. So 250 gap limit doesn't mean you have just 250 addresses in your wallet. I've explained it here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1845025.msg18535357#msg18535357Well, I used 2 of the 250 addresses, so I guess that had to do something with gap limit.
Yes, it says "gap_limit": 252,
As for counting the addresses, I'm using
listaddresses() - receiving addresses + change addresses
or
print "\n".join(i for i in wallet.get_receiving_addresses() ) - only receiving addresses
Then copy all of the addresses to excel and I get 346 or 352 rows.
Just read your posts, can we clarify this. If i set my gap limit to 250, and received some coins to the 166th address then electrum will look up to my gap limit (250) and create additional addresses until I have (166+250=416) total addresses? And it's not possible for me to lose some addresses/bitcoins, as long as I remember my seed words and have the ability to increase the gap limit, because the default one is 20, right?