counting of unread articles in IMAP

counting of unread articles in IMAP

[Denys Duchier]

My IMAP folders often indicate an incorrect number of unread articles
(in the Group buffer), e.g. it will say 8 when there are in fact 5
unread messages.  Simply visiting the corresponding folder seems to
resynchronize the counter, which suggests that the correct number is
available.  Is there a good reason why I am at first presented with
guess work rather than fact?  I.e. isn't there a way to ask the IMAP
server for the number of unread messages (I understand the limitations
of NNTP, but isn't IMAP supposed to be way cooler?).

Cheers,

-- 
Dr. Denys Duchier			Denys.Duchier@ps.uni-sb.de
Forschungsbereich Programmiersysteme	(Programming Systems Lab)
Universitaet des Saarlandes, Geb. 45	http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier
Postfach 15 11 50			Phone: +49 681 302 5618
66041 Saarbruecken, Germany		Fax:   +49 681 302 5615

Re: counting of unread articles in IMAP

[Simon Josefsson]

Denys Duchier <Denys.Duchier@ps.uni-sb.de> writes:

> My IMAP folders often indicate an incorrect number of unread articles
> (in the Group buffer), e.g. it will say 8 when there are in fact 5
> unread messages.  Simply visiting the corresponding folder seems to
> resynchronize the counter, which suggests that the correct number is
> available.  Is there a good reason why I am at first presented with
> guess work rather than fact?  I.e. isn't there a way to ask the IMAP
> server for the number of unread messages (I understand the limitations
> of NNTP, but isn't IMAP supposed to be way cooler?).

Yes, but Gnus uses a protocol similar to NNTP to talk to the backends,
so there is no way to tell Gnus about that number (w/o changing the
backend interface in Gnus), it can only report low/high article number
and Gnus make a educated guess about the number of unread articles.

Hopefully this will change once the more important nnimap bugs has
been solved.