On Thu, 30 Jun 2011 13:04:23 +1000, Brian May <brian at microcomaustralia.com.au> wrote: > On 30 June 2011 08:40, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote: > > The 'a' keybinding, (in turn), was designed for cases when you *know* > > you don't want to read the rest of the thread. > > ... in which case it should also mark everything as read. IMHO.
I know the current behavior only catches my opinion (and only an opinion I had at one particular point in time). So I won't say this is Right, but I will at least explain what I was thinking: The "unread" tag is distinct from the "inbox" tag. Why two tags? Don't they normally change at the same time? If a key like 'a' got rid of the "unread" tag as well as the "inbox" then there would be almost no need for having two tags. The idea I had is that "inbox" is fully under explicit control by the user. The user must make an intentional decision to "archive" a message in order for that tag to be removed. Distinct from that is "unread" which is handled automatically by the mail client (as well as it can tell what you've actually read or not). So this tag is removed only implicitly, (we don't have specific commands to manipulate the "unread" tag). When the client displays a message as the "current" message it immediately removes the "unread" tag. Whenever it displays a message to the user, (as the "current" message), it removes the unread tag from that message. This means that messages can lose the "unread" tag while still remaining tagged "inbox", (you read a message, but don't archive it), and that messages can lose the "archive" tag while still remaining tagged "unread", (you archive a thread before reading all messages in the thread). The distinction ends up being useful to me. If at some point someone points me to a specific message, and when I search for it I see the "unread" tag, then this highlights to me that I never even looked at the message. > Are there any keyboard bindings to go forwards to the next message or > backwards to the last message without marking anything as archived? As mentioned by someone else, you can navigate the messages in a thread with 'n' and 'p'. One of the obviously missing keybindings is a way to easily navigate
