I had an idea for a new feature in mutt, and I wanted to guage
reaction to it here.
I'm a little frustrated with the way mutt handles new mail. My
specific frustrations are as follows:
1. It's not consistent between formats.
2. Mutt "forgets" that you have new (technically unread) mail with
some formats
3. With other formats, mutt will always bounce back to mail in
folders which come first in the list if it contains "new" mail,
even if you've already seen all those messages in the index, though
you may not be interested in reading them right now.
4. Back-up methods which rely on (and modify) access times throw
off mutt's default new mail detection routines with some mail
formats.
My idea doesn't fix all of these, but it would help with #2 and #3.
I'm largely of the opinion that Mutt's new mail handling really ought
to be completely redesigned, but in the mean time, I think it might be
simple to implement the following improvement:
In whatever structure is used to track the status of folders (I'm
not familiar with the code, so I'll have to read through it), add an
unread-mail flag. Then:
- If a folder has "new" mail, but the user has seen them in the
index, set the unread flag (i.e. set it every time a user opens
a mail folder).
- If the user reads all mail in the folder, clear the unread flag.
- If a folder marked unread subsequently receives new mail, clear
the unread flag (allowing mutt to treat it normally w/regard to
new mail).
- When changing folders, order the folders according to the normal
method, except sort folders with unread unset first, followed by
folders with unread set.
This assumes that Mutt maintains some amount of state for every
mailbox it has touched. If it doesn't, that would suck. Again I'm
not familiar with the code, so I'll have to look at it. Feel free to
point out anything I'm overlooking here...
If I get significant positive feedback, I /may/ work on this as time
allows. If I get feedback from those with CVS commit access that this
is likely to make it into the mainstream mutt code, that'll make it a
lot more likely that I'll bother with this. I hate maintaining
patches.
Mutt is (IMO) far and away the best mailer in existence; however I
think this is one specific area where mutt really doesn't suck less
than the rest.
--
Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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