nnimap read/unread

nnimap read/unread

[Erik Bourget]

Hey;

I'm sure that this is an intensely obnoxious question, BUT:

Is nnimap supposed to display the read/unread messages as they are reported
by the imap server, or is it normal for it to cache these locally?

- Erik

Re: nnimap read/unread

[Kai Grossjohann]

Erik Bourget <erik@midmaine.com> writes:

> Is nnimap supposed to display the read/unread messages as they are
> reported by the imap server, or is it normal for it to cache these
> locally?

Why do you mention read/unread explicitly?  I'll pretend you didn't,
because I don't understand what you mean by it.

By default, Gnus caches headers locally and uses the cached versions.
You need to do something extra to get Gnus to download the bodies,
too.

Just hitting g on a message in the summary buffer ought to re-fetch it
from the server, in the default configuration.

Kai

Re: nnimap read/unread

[Erik Bourget]

Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de> writes:

> Erik Bourget <erik@midmaine.com> writes:
>
>> Is nnimap supposed to display the read/unread messages as they are
>> reported by the imap server, or is it normal for it to cache these
>> locally?
>
> Why do you mention read/unread explicitly?  I'll pretend you didn't,
> because I don't understand what you mean by it.

An IMAP server knows which messages you have seen before.  Gnus ignores
this.  Can I make it pay attention (so it says Inbox (2) instead of
Inbox(500)) ?

- Erik

Re: nnimap read/unread

[Kai Grossjohann]

Erik Bourget <erik@midmaine.com> writes:

> An IMAP server knows which messages you have seen before.  Gnus ignores
> this.  Can I make it pay attention (so it says Inbox (2) instead of
> Inbox(500)) ?

Ah!  The server tells you the number of unread messages, not the
number of unseen ones.  But you can put %U into gnus-group-line-format
to show the number of unseen messages in a group.

Also, Gnus uses an estimate of the number of messages in a group:
highest article number minus lowest article number plus one.  So if
some articles are missing (because you deleted or moved them, say),
then the estimate will be off.  The number of unread articles is based
on this estimate, minus the number of read articles...

Gnus 5.10 has code to make better estimates, but I'm not sure how good
these estimates are, and also I don't remember when that code was
added to Gnus.

Does this help?

Kai

Re: nnimap read/unread

[Paul Jarc]

Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de> wrote:
> Erik Bourget <erik@midmaine.com> writes:
>> An IMAP server knows which messages you have seen before.  Gnus ignores
>> this.  Can I make it pay attention (so it says Inbox (2) instead of
>> Inbox(500)) ?
>
> Ah!  The server tells you the number of unread messages, not the
> number of unseen ones.

Well, the flag that is called "read" in Gnus is called "seen" in IMAP.
So the server says how many unseen messages there are, and Gnus hears
how many unread messages there are.


paul