"Expunging" a box will, AFAIK traverse all messages, look for those that
are marked for deletion and remove them. A side effect of this seems to
be, that all those traversed messages seem to get marked as "Seen" aka
"Status: O" ("old"). Is this a requirement of some sort? Isn't there a way
around it?
That's not "Seen" status; that's "Recent" status or rather "not Recent" status. "Seen" is "Status: R".
No, there is no way to get around the "not Recent" happening once the mailbox has been opened readwrite. The definition of "Recent" is that the message has arrived since the last time the mailbox was opened readwrite.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
