On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, David Woodhouse wrote: > A common behaviour I desire from a client is to find mailboxen which > have new mail. Yet the \Unmarked flag doesn't necessarily indicate that > status. The \Unmarked flag says that no new mail has been delivered > since the mailbox was last SELECTed.
Your argument is fallacious. You define "have new mail" in a way that is different from what \Marked and \Unmarked indicate, and conclude that these flags are not useful. The fallacy is the presumption that your definition for "have new mail" is a global definition that applies in all cases. > Consider the case where my main client is issuing a LIST periodically > then asking for STATUS of non-\Unmarked folders. > I connect with another client, SELECT a folder and FETCH an old message > from it, for some reason. The folder in question had new mail in it, > which my main client had not yet observed... but now the folder doesn't > have \Unmarked status since it's been SELECTed since the new mail was > delivered. There is a solution to that. If your "another client" did not want to take responsibility for the new mail, it should have used the EXAMINE command. That's why EXAMINE is there! Your complaint, in other words, is that you used a broken client which canceled the \Recent status of your new messages and rendered the mailbox \Unmarked, and that therefore \Recent and \Unmarked are not useful. I'd claim that if you fix your broken client, you won't have the problem. > I'd much rather see \Unmarked clearly defined as 'This folder contains > no messages without \Seen flag', and \Marked similarly defined as 'This > folder contains messages without \Seen flag.' That just duplicates the UNSEEN value from STATUS, and defeats the entire purpose. > That would seem more in > line with what's really desired by real-world clients. What do you mean by "real world client"? Does your client have as many seats as Pine? -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
