Re: N versus . for unseen messages

[Nuutti Kotivuori <nuutti.kotivuori@smarttrust.com>]

Kai Großjohann wrote:
> Nuutti Kotivuori <nuutti.kotivuori@smarttrust.com> writes:
>> Kai Großjohann wrote:
>>> Some of my unseen messages are marked `N', some are marked `.'.
>>> It's clear to me that `N' is used only in nnimap groups, but then
>>> why do I sometimes see `.' in nnimap groups?
>>
>> 'N' comes from the IMAP server's recent status, '.' comes from
>> Gnus's idea of what's new and what's not. Apparently these two are
>> running at the same time - and accesses outside Gnus atleast do
>> change the state of both.
> 
> I never access my mail from outside Gnus.  At least, not knowingly.

Fetchmail? Biff? Maybe even some 'g', 'M-g' or other invocation could
unwillingly change the recent flag on server. The RFC says that it is
set for exactly the first seesion to _have been notified_ about this
message - only STATUS command does not alter recent. So unless care is
taken that a mailbox is never selected or examined before actually
entered, it's impossible to properly get the recent flags from the
server. (And I believe getting the smallest/biggest uid for messages
in a group is impossible without selecting the group. ((The status
command can return NEXTUID, which is the next uid to be reserved -
though that is ofcourse a different matter)))

And all this is ofcourse expecting a fully standards compliant server
- I won't start imagining what bogosities some servers do with recent.

But I don't know anything about nnimap really, so perhaps Simon could
answer this one better.

-- Naked