On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Rick Macdougall wrote: >> unseen. So STATUS will report 0 recent, 0 unseen. If STATUS asked for >> MESSAGES, it would get 1. >What is the difference between Recent and Unseen then ? This feature >does work with courier and imap-uw
\Recent is an artifact from the early 80s when IMAP was first defined. In those days, there was only one mailbox accessor and a user always read his/her email with the same client. The first time a client saw a message, it would be marked as \Recent throughout the session. This makes sense, as it distinguishes between mail you've read and mail that just arrived. When you read a mail, it gets marked as \Seen, which means it's not unseen anymore. But if you close your IMAP connection, all messages that used to be \Recent are no longer \Recent. Today, with webmail clients that open and close connections, and with multiaccessed mailboxes (still only one client sees the \Recent flag), \Recent is a waste of time and space. Modern IMAP client implementors should ignore the flag and keep track themselves of what is recent and not. The \Seen and UNSEEN counts count how many messages in a mailbox have the \Seen flag set. So if you ever fetched the body of a message, it's no longer unseen. If Horde closed the connection afterwards, it's no longer \Recent. Andy :-) -- Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg Author of Binc IMAP | "It is better not to do something http://www.bincimap.org/ | than to do it poorly."
