Michael Heerdegen <[email protected]> writes:
> Bob Newell <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> This goes well beyond my very limited knowledge so I did an
>> experiment. I went to the gmail web interface and found an
>> already-opened message in the All Mail folder (really a label)
>> that I knew for certain I had originally opened in gnus, so
>> therefore gnus would have known about the message. I marked
>> it unread (on the web) and moved it back to INBOX.
>>
>> Then I started up gnus and gnus saw the message as an unread
>> INBOX message. Based on this it appears the answer is yes,
>> gnus did update the status of this previously seen email.
>> However I don't know how much if any status information gnus
>> actually keeps (and I don't use the registry) so this may or
>> may not be meaningless. It certainly seems as if, when
>> reopening the group subsequent to shutting down gnus at some
>> point, gnus gets a fresh set of information.
>
> Thanks for doing this experiment. I hoped for that result.
>
> AFAIU Gnus stores such stuff in a file named ".newsrc.eld" (AFAIR
> ".newsrc.el" in older Emacs versions). And indeed, among other things
> there seems to be information about "seen" status of messages in that
> file, as well as saved status, ticked and dormant status, all of that
> Gnus specific stuff, but nothing related to the "read" (or "old")
> status. So I guess the "read" status is fetched every time when you
> open the group, along with the rest (list of existing messages etc).
Here's the mapping between Gnus' marks and IMAP flags, I believe things
like "gnus-save" are set as user flags on servers that support that:
(defvar nnimap-mark-alist
'((read "\\Seen" %Seen)
(tick "\\Flagged" %Flagged)
(reply "\\Answered" %Answered)
(expire "gnus-expire")
(dormant "gnus-dormant")
(score "gnus-score")
(save "gnus-save")
(download "gnus-download")
(forward "gnus-forward")))