Re: Setting seen marks on server.

[Simon Josefsson <jas@pdc.kth.se>]

Donald Hunter <dhunter@atlan-tech.com> writes:

> Articles which I read never get marked as Seen on the server.
> I noticed that nnimap-request-article does an RFC822.PEEK.  By
> removing the .PEEK the article is marked as Seen as soon as I
> fetch it.  This is good because it means other mail readers don't 
> offer it to me.  Is the .PEEK intentional ?

Yup. The Gnus way to do flag setting is to do them when you exit the
folder with 'q'. If you exit a folder with 'Q' (or C-k) the flags
should not be set. This way, we need to wait until one quits to group
to send the flag updates to the server, and since fetching articles
without PEEK will set the flag, we use PEEK.

> What is the purpose of nnimap-request-update-mark ?

It should be called by Gnus whenever it wants to set a mark on a
article. nnimap-request-update-mark propagates theese to the server.

The backend function wasn't meant for informing the backend about mark
updates, and it does not work correctly used this way either.

> For me it never gets called.  I had a trawl through the gnus source
> and I can see that it will get called when I do catchup, but only if
> gnus-use-cache is set to true.  But it does nothing for the
> gnus-catchup-mark.  I changed this to mark articles with the Seen
> flag, which gives me the behaviour I am looking for.  However, it
> doesn't seem to be a useful function since gnus hardly ever calls
> it.

I submitted some patches (applied to Gnus 5.6.43 and the pGnus series)
which call it more often. I think the backend function was only meant
for supporting expiring within nnvirtual, for other things it did a
poor job.

Nnimap 0.32 should be better.

/s