Quoting from Rob MacGregor's mail on Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 02:08:38PM +0000:
A good example of why you shouldn't manage a single mailbox from multiple
locations if you can avoid it.
There are two valid reasons why mailboxes have to be managed from
multiple locations when the "keep" option has been specified:
1) The typical case could be a roaming account. fetchmail is
downloading to some onsite account while the person could be checking
from time to time from some offsite location. In fact, that could be a
reason for specifying "keep" in the first place. In this situation,
that person may go through the required mails only. These mails will
not then get downloaded.
2) Suppose you have specified some "limit" option and then manually
check the mailbox for the big mails. You may at that time read some
mail which are below the limit too, some of which might have recently
arrived. These mails will not then get downloaded.
Also, you would like to access the mailbox from time to time just to
delete the old mails.
The obvious solution is not to have the "keep" option at all. However,
many who are either roaming or on temporary basis or are checking the
mailbox from both office and home would prefer to have the "keep"
option.
I'd suggest that changing fetchmail to "solve" this is probably the wrong
way of solving the problem. Surely it's better to have the mail client
point to the mailbox that fetchmail delivers to? Otherwise you might find
that the overloading of the flags leads to other unpredicted problems.
Undoubtedly, the flags should be a user option only. It will not be
enabled by default. Something like:
poll "server" protocol imap setflag "DRAFT" ...
The default (and fallback) flag will be "SEEN" then.
Also, the user flag would be used iff it is also declared in the FLAGS
(or PERMANENTFLAGS). Otherwise, the fallback flag will be used. The
coding should be similar to the idle flag check.
When the server itself has declared that DRAFT is a permanent flag,
there should be no problem.
Sunil Shetye.