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Re: Not always seeing new mail in mailboxes



On Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 12:43:51PM +0100, cl@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> For some reason mutt is not now seeing new mail in all the mailboxes I
> have listed in the mailboxes command.  However when I manually navigate
> to the mailboxes in question messages there are marked as N[ew].
> 
> What sort of things are likely to cause this problem?  

My guess would be that the system administrator is running some kind
of periodic process (like a system back-up) which changes the atime of
the files after your last received mail in that folder...  Maybe he's
using Amanda?

I seem to recall I had a similar problem with low-volume mbox mail
folders, and IIRC for some reason the buffy-size feature didn't fix it
(or maybe there was some other kind of problem, I don't remember all
the details).  Regrettably, the only solution I found which completely
solved my problem was to switch to maildir (I too prefer mbox by a
wide margin, for various reasons).

I still use mbox for high-volume mailboxes.  I had to give up on IMAP
though, because (at the time) I couldn't find an IMAP server that
supported both maildir and mbox.  Dovecot may do it (I know it
supports both, just not sure if it does both simultaneously).  I
remember trying that and encountering some problem, though I don't
remember what the problem was...  All of this was quite a long time
ago.

Anyway, unfortunately new mail detection for mbox folders is one of
the things that still sucks in Mutt, and probably always will.  The
only way to do it right is to (at least initially) read the whole
folder to check status flags, or maintain index and state information
in a subordinate file for each mailbox.  I've brought this issue up
several times before, and many people have argued against both of
these on grounds of either performance or complexity, with I think is
totally lame.  Every other mailer in existence gets this right, AFAIK,
making such arguments a BS copout IMNSHO.  Obviously the developers
use maildir or are lucky enough to live on systems which don't exhibit
these problems...

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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