Re: gnus in an IMAP multi-client setup.

[William Gardella]

Daniel Corbe <corbe@corbe.net> writes:

> I hope this is the right place to ask for general advice.  gnus makes an
> awesome news reader and with all the performance gains with the version
> of gnus distributed with emacs24 I'd like to use it as an IMAP mail
> reader as well.
>
> I need gnus to behave in a cooperative way with other IMAP clients.
> gnus is marking entire folders as read as soon as I open them
> up in the group summary buffer.  This is undesirable behavior, because
> then my other IMAP clients also show the message marked as read.
>
> Can someone point me in the right direction?  I'd like to be able to
> manually toggle the read status of a message or even have it done
> automatically -- but only after I've viewed the message.
>
> -Daniel

Daniel,

Could we see your setup?  How are you accessing IMAP mail?

I use my two IMAP accounts as secondary select methods and they don't
mark mail as read (technically, set the IMAP Seen flag) until I have either
actually read them or told Gnus to mark them as read.  The two accounts
are set up like this:


(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
      '((nnimap "imap.pitt.edu"
                 (nnimap-server-port 993)
                 (nnimap-stream ssl)
                 (nnir-search-engine imap))
        (nnimap "imap.gmail.com"
                 (nnimap-server-port 993)
                 (nnimap-stream ssl)
                 (nnir-search-engine imap))))

I have experienced behavior like you describe when experimenting with
Fetchmail as an IMAP retrieval agent, however.  Fetchmail rudely sets
Seen when it fetches.  It's a very good reason not to use Fetchmail for
IMAP; if you like that sort of utility, better to use getmail or
offlineimap, which behave more properly from an IMAP standpoint.