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Re: Marking Incoming Messages as "New"

2000-08-05 10:48:03
What a blast from the past.  This used to be an FAQ around here.  Jack Yee
wrote,

| I've been using procmail to process certain incoming messages and 
| directing them to go to certain designated files.  I've noticed that these
| new messages when processed by procmail are marked as already read when I
| check the designated file.  As a result, when I want to read the messages,
| I can't tell which message is new and which message I already read (all 
| messages are marked read).
| 
| Is there a way to have procmail, when processing new messages, send them 
| to the designated file and keep the "New" message flag until I actually 
| read it?

Are you using Elm, Jack?  If you examine the folders with a paginator and
look at the stored text of the messages, you'll see that those that appear
"new" in your main spool have no status marker at all, and those that are
new but aren't marked that way on the index screens of your other folders
don't have one either.  Procmail didn't alter anything.  It didn't fail to
keep a new-message flag, because there is none to keep.  You'll find the
same results if you use any other mail thrower.

Elm is the problem (or if you're using a different mail client, it's doing
the same thing Elm does): it believes that if a message is in a folder other
than the user's main spool, then the user must have moved it there manually,
and that counts as having been seen and not being new any more.  More recent
versions of Elm were rumored to have abandoned that position, or to offer a
way to list folders in the .elm/elmrc file where "new" flags would be shown
for messages without Status: headers.

However, if there is a "Status: O" header on a message, Elm displays an O
on the index screen no matter which folder the message is in.  So I worked
around it with a procmail recipe that has formail add "Status: O" to any
message that is going to be stored in a folder other than $DEFAULT.  Then
the new messages show up as "O", while those that I have really read have
"Status: RO" in their headers and no N or O flag on the index screen.

Procmail is not the problem here, but it can be the solution.


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