Re: nnimap questions

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

hirsch@mathcs.emory.edu writes:

> When reading news, articles that I've read should not show up the
> next time I read the newsgroup unless I explicitly mark them to
> stick around.  This sounds like what you called expiring.

This is the default behaviour. Adding expiring just makes old, read
articles go away permanently.

> When reading mail, letters I have read should still be there the next time I
> read mail, unless I mark them for deletion and expunge them.  If I don't
> expunge then they should still be there, but be marked for deletion.  (This is
> the way all of my other imap clients work.)

Yes. Except that Gnus doesn't have a "delete mark" -- so there isn't a
way to mark a message for deletion in Gnus.

Also, articles marked as deleted in other clients doesn't show at all
in gnus.

This is a thing where gnus doesn't work like other imap clients,
pre-nnimap Gnus users are used to this behaviour and mark articles
"expired" to delete them, whereas people who uses other IMAP clients
uses IMAP-deleted for that purpose.

Some time I ago we discussed making expired marks equal to imap-delete
marks. There was a majority against it, because some IMAP clients tend
to automatically, or almost automatically, send EXPUNGE commands when
you close a mailbox, and then you'd lose articles you'd otherwise know
would stick around for 14 days (or whatever). Also, other clients
don't let you remove "deleted" articles based on certain conditions
(like age), it's either all or nothing.

> My imap server (don't know what it is, but I think it is whatever Sun ships
> with Solaris) seems to distinguish among new mail, unread mail, read mail, and
> deleted (but not yet expunged) mail.  So do my clients (ml, tkrat, Mahogany)
> Can nnimap do this?

Gnus/nnimap doesn't handle deleted (but not yet expunged) mail.

> It looks like just what I would like, except I couldn't get it
> configured right.

Looks like you're running into lacking functionality.

When one manually delete a article in Gnus, the article line in your
summary buffer is rendered with a different text face -- this could be
used to render imap-deleted articles in. Problem with this is that you
would not be able to do disconnected mode operation on deleted
articles since Gnus really doesn't have any mark that says "this
article is deleted".

I don't know how hard it would be to add a proper "deleted" mark to
Gnus. I would need to learn much more about how Gnus works to do it
anyway.

> I do appreciate all the work you've been putting into it and the
> rapid development and bug fixes I've seen on this mailing list.

Thank you, I hope this clears the picture a bit more. Feedback from
people who are used to other clients are most valuable, I haven't
really used anything else than Pine and Gnus so my field of vision is
limited.