Re: marking a message as "read"
On Fri, Sep 06, 2019 at 07:50:36AM -0700, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote: If you have both "new" and "old" messages in the mailbox and want to clear both of them (marking them as read), I would suggest using something like ~UO Clearing "old" will actually set both "new" and "old" messages to "read". Just to follow-up to this and at the same time address Kurt's question, clearing "new" effectively does so too. So ~UN would work just as well. Internally, Mutt uses two different bits, "old", and "read" to represent the three states. "O" sets the read bit and unsets the old bit, while "N" only sets the read bit. However, Mutt patterns and display flags ignore the old bit if read is set. -- Kevin J. McCarthy GPG Fingerprint: 8975 A9B3 3AA3 7910 385C 5308 ADEF 7684 8031 6BDA signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: marking a message as "read"
On Fri, Sep 06, 2019 at 12:38:25PM -0400, Kurt Hackenberg wrote: > On 2019-09-06 10:50, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote: > > > Both "new" and "old" are "unread". "read" means neither new nor old. > > That sounds familiar. I think that goes back about 40 years, long before > Mutt, to how spooling of incoming messages was implemented, and the > introduction of the non-standard header Status:. > > Messages that had never seen by a mail reader were "new". Those that had > been seen by a mail reader but not by the user were "old". Those seen by the > user were "read". > > Does Mutt store this as a single state with three possible values? Clearly > there's some logic on top of that. Also clearly, this is burdened with 40 > years of compatibility. You can unset 'mark_old' if you don't want the behavior. I've personally never found it super useful. For Maildir, I believe messages will be marked old once they're out of the 'new' directory. w
Re: marking a message as "read"
On 2019-09-06 10:50, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote: Both "new" and "old" are "unread". "read" means neither new nor old. That sounds familiar. I think that goes back about 40 years, long before Mutt, to how spooling of incoming messages was implemented, and the introduction of the non-standard header Status:. Messages that had never seen by a mail reader were "new". Those that had been seen by a mail reader but not by the user were "old". Those seen by the user were "read". Does Mutt store this as a single state with three possible values? Clearly there's some logic on top of that. Also clearly, this is burdened with 40 years of compatibility.
Re: marking a message as "read"
On Fri, Sep 06, 2019 at 03:23:05PM +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote: I've some confusion about "read" and "unread" versus "old" and "new". There are status flags for new and old. Unread messages seem to be new, but if I read a message it doesn't acquire an "(O)ld" flag, though it loses its "(N)ew" flag. Both "new" and "old" are "unread". "read" means neither new nor old. I've skimmed the manual, and i can't see what the criteria are for considering a message New or Old. $mark_old controls this when exiting a mailbox. You can also manually toggle "old" via or . also works, but it follows the path: old ==> new <==> unread An old message will be toggled to new. new/unread toggle between each other. It's easy to find these messages, but I can't see how to mark them as "read". I can mark threads and subthreads as read, but not individual messages. and / work for individual messages as well as tagged ones. If you have both "new" and "old" messages in the mailbox and want to clear both of them (marking them as read), I would suggest using something like ~UO Clearing "old" will actually set both "new" and "old" messages to "read". -- Kevin J. McCarthy GPG Fingerprint: 8975 A9B3 3AA3 7910 385C 5308 ADEF 7684 8031 6BDA signature.asc Description: PGP signature
