Re: Does Gnus read and sync the read with IMAP?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Michael Heerdegen <michael_heerdegen@web.de> writes:

> Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net> writes:
>
>> This goes well beyond my very limited knowledge so I did an
>> experiment.  I went to the gmail web interface and found an
>> already-opened message in the All Mail folder (really a label)
>> that I knew for certain I had originally opened in gnus, so
>> therefore gnus would have known about the message.  I marked
>> it unread (on the web) and moved it back to INBOX.
>>
>> Then I started up gnus and gnus saw the message as an unread
>> INBOX message.  Based on this it appears the answer is yes,
>> gnus did update the status of this previously seen email.
>> However I don't know how much if any status information gnus
>> actually keeps (and I don't use the registry) so this may or
>> may not be meaningless.  It certainly seems as if, when
>> reopening the group subsequent to shutting down gnus at some
>> point, gnus gets a fresh set of information.
>
> Thanks for doing this experiment.  I hoped for that result.
>
> AFAIU Gnus stores such stuff in a file named ".newsrc.eld" (AFAIR
> ".newsrc.el" in older Emacs versions).  And indeed, among other things
> there seems to be information about "seen" status of messages in that
> file, as well as saved status, ticked and dormant status, all of that
> Gnus specific stuff, but nothing related to the "read" (or "old")
> status.  So I guess the "read" status is fetched every time when you
> open the group, along with the rest (list of existing messages etc).

Here's the mapping between Gnus' marks and IMAP flags, I believe things
like "gnus-save" are set as user flags on servers that support that:

(defvar nnimap-mark-alist
  '((read "\\Seen" %Seen)
    (tick "\\Flagged" %Flagged)
    (reply "\\Answered" %Answered)
    (expire "gnus-expire")
    (dormant "gnus-dormant")
    (score "gnus-score")
    (save "gnus-save")
    (download "gnus-download")
    (forward "gnus-forward")))