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Re: optional sleep before marking a message as "read" ?



On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 04:20:59AM EDT, Laas Toom wrote:
> On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 09:59:56PM -0700, Sami Samhuri wrote:
> > > It was Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 10:48:05PM +0200 when Guilhem Bichot said:

> > > I have seen in some other MUAs: a configurable amount of time: "only
> > > if I pass more than X seconds on the email then mark it as "read"".
> > > I could not find the equivalent in the muttrc file.
> > > Is this possible in Mutt? Is there a workaround?
> > > Would you consider this a useful addition (if yes, I could contribute
> > > for this; what would be the best name for the configurable time
> > > variable?) ?
> > 
> > I hadn't even thought about this since switching to mutt, but now that
> > you mention it I have scanned through messages and wished they hadn't
> > been marked read. I would like to see this implemented as well.

[par(1)ed (with "par p2") to split long line:]
> I think this is not needed, because mutt has index view that most
> of GUI-enabled MUA-s do not have (all they have is the split-screen
> view). The best comparison is Pine, where you have index view and a
> message (pager) view.

It's not _needed_, correct, but neither are half the other funky features
of Mutt (including the index view in pager mode which got this whole
topic started in the first place).

[par(1)ed (with "par p2") to split long line:]
> The few lines of index in the pager view in mutt are (IMHO) just for
> informative purposes (e.g. when i read a message from a list, i can
> see that there are other messages in that thread and i probably should
> read those too, before replying to this message, as this reduces
> redundant messages to the list).

What if your sorting method isn't normally threaded?  In that case,
you're gonna have to change the sort method on-the-fly if you want to
do that.  FWIW, I don't use index_context at all, but Mutt isn't about
limiting people to only one way of doing things.

> Despite you can see few lines of index in pager view, you actually can
> not navigate in the indes (have you noticed, that while in index, you
> can navigate using arrow-keys, but in pager view the 'n' and 'p' are
> the keys to get to next item. This means that being in pager view is
> considered reading the message thus marking the message read.

Have you noticed the number of navigating functions available from
within the pager view?  Clearly, one can easily rebind a bunch of keys,
and produce an excellent setup for navigating around from right within
the "pager" view.  The only thing missing now is the ability to tell
Mutt not to mark things read automatically.  (I guess mark_read_after
could be set to -1 to never mark read automatically, 0 to immediately
mark, or some positive number to produce a timeout.  The only technical
issue is that Mutt currently has no concept of a timeout other than
mail checking, AFAIK, so you may wanna look at the timeout-hook patch
(which abuses Mutt's mail-checking timeout) for some ideas.)

> If you do not want to mark this message read, but want to skip to more
> important messages at the bottom, you can to several things:

but each has major problems:

> * use the index mode

...and lose the preview pane :-(

> * use the 'N' key to mark the message Unread again (pressing 'N'
>   probably drops you at the next item too)

...and imagine trying to go through 3K messages in a reverse sorting
method (so you have to go up twice after each 'N' unless you've unset
resolve_next), without having any easy way of skipping SPAM, or any
other stuff like that :-(

If you're gonna be previewing 3K messages and only reading 300, it makes
more sense to simply turn off Mutt's automatic read marking, and let
the user mark stuff read automatically.  However, some people like the
timeout idea, and the same option (as I showed above) can easily be used
for both of the above simultaneously, so why not?

> One other method that i use is the flagged-messages: the messages i
> consider important, but want to deal with them later i flag and have
> configured mutt to highlight them in index view and some macros to
> limit to flagged messages, so that i can quickly browse through them,
> when i got to this part.

You don't wanna go around flagging 2.7K messages just so you know they're
really unread contrary to Mutt's claim just because Mutt's too stupid
to listen when you tell it you're not reading messages now, but just
previewing them.

 - Dave

-- 
Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor?
It's simple, Skyler.  You've seen what food processors do to food, right?

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