On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 22:38, Mark Crispin wrote: > That's one possible implementation/interpretation. Here's another: > > No status --> folder _may_ have new mail --> check it. > \Marked --> folder probably has new mail --> go there. > \Unmarked --> folder doesn't have new mail --> skip it.
OK... the 'go there' bit seems fairly much specific to pine and text-mode clients AFAICT, but yes -- that is indeed another possible interpretation. It seems that most GUI clients have something akin to the big folder tree with numbers of unseen mail by each folder, and the user clicks on the folders they desire. I wouldn't have it any other way -- when there's unseen mail in more than one folder, _I_ choose the order in which I prioritise those folders, not my MUA. And that priority varies daily, if not hourly -- it's not something an MUA is _ever_ going to learn. > In your case (wanting to check for not \Seen status), you probably want: > > No status --> folder _may_ have unseen mail --> check it. > \Marked --> folder probably has unseen mail --> go there. > \Unmarked --> folder _may_ have unseen mail --> check it. Except that as discussed, 'go there' isn't really an appropriate action in any client I'd actually want to sit in front of all day -- hence all three states equate to 'check it', and the whole thing is not useful to me. I don't think I'm alone in that preference. I'd like to have some way of knowing I can skip the folder in question. I was assuming -- evidently wrongly -- that the existing ambiguous meanings of \Marked and \Unmarked were sufficiently pointless that they could be 'clarified' to mean what I consider useful. Failing that though, I'd perhaps like to see a _separate \Nounseen flag in the LIST response which _does_ give the hint I desire. > > The client didn't know that all I was doing was fetching one message. In > > all probability, the client is pine. > > Pine always announces new mail. Hence the human user saw the new mail, > and for whatever reason elected not to read it at that time. That is, in my opinion, a fundamentally flawed assumption. If you tell me "110 messages saved to folder INBOX.lists.linux-kernel" that does _not_ mean I saw them all :) To be honest, I find the \Recent flag to be entirely bizarre. I appreciate its historical context, and I understand that it's generally trivial for the server to generate it given traditional mbox format, but I fail to see how it maps to users' desired behaviour in any way, and it's fundamentally unworkable in a world with multiple clients, so it doesn't really seem to be appropriate any more. But I wouldn't necessarily advocate its removal -- I'd just like to see, as I said above, some way for my own (entirely theoretical at this point) IMAP client to know that it can skip issuing STATUS for certain mailboxen when it's interested in \Seen status, not \Recent status. I shall investigate the LISTEXT work of which you speak -- it sounds like that might be what I'm after. Thanks for the pointer. -- dwmw2
