On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 10:45:40AM -0600, Derek Martin wrote: > On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 04:29:24PM +0000, Chris G wrote: > > > However when I come to read mail in the morning the incoming E-Mail has > > > been accessed by my backup system and the above mechanism doesn't work. > > > I know one way to solve the problem would be to make the backup system a > > > bit cleverer but that's rather difficult at the moment. > > That's the best solution, and depending on the exact nature of "rather > difficult" I'd suggest you pursue that. If you really just can't, > then the alternative that's most likely to work for you is to set > $check_mbox_size. I seem to recall that this is also not without its > problems, though other than the obvious case of the mbox changing > in such a way that its size does not. But if there were other > problems, I can't recall what they were... > I'll take a look, it may be possible but it does seem a bit of a difficult way to do something essentially simple.
> > > If I look in the individual mbox files the new mail *is* actually marked > > > as N[ew] by the mail delivery program. So, is there a way to get mutt > > > to scan the mbox files in my mailboxes list and flag up which ones have > > > new mail? ... and is the only reason for not doing this by default that > > > it would be slow? > > > > No answers? Is that because this is a really silly question or what? > > > > What I want is a means to ask mutt to scan the individual messages in > > each mbox file in the mailboxes list to look for messages which have 'N' > > in the Status: header. > > FWIW, most mail systems, AFAIK, don't actually deliver mail with a > 'N' in the Status header. Rather, they deliver the mail with no > status header at all. The status header usually only contains 'N' if > the user's mailer added it after the user actually read the mail, and > told the mailer it wanted the message to be treated as new. > My 'mail delivery system' is Postfix plus a Python script that does filtering, I think it must be Postfix that's adding the Status: header as I can't see how my Python script can possibly be doing it. > Regardless, Mutt lacks this feature. The historical reason is that > for large mailboxes, it's slow. I've argued for years that a) this is > mostly not true on any reasonable hardware, and b) so what if it is? > It's the only way to do new mail detection *properly*, and if that's > what the user wants, it should be possible to ask for it. > > Of course, someone would need to write the code... > I quite agree! :-) -- Chris Green
