On Fri, Sep 06, 2019 at 12:38:25PM -0400, Kurt Hackenberg wrote: > On 2019-09-06 10:50, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote: > > > Both "new" and "old" are "unread". "read" means neither new nor old. > > That sounds familiar. I think that goes back about 40 years, long before > Mutt, to how spooling of incoming messages was implemented, and the > introduction of the non-standard header Status:. > > Messages that had never seen by a mail reader were "new". Those that had > been seen by a mail reader but not by the user were "old". Those seen by the > user were "read". > > Does Mutt store this as a single state with three possible values? Clearly > there's some logic on top of that. Also clearly, this is burdened with 40 > years of compatibility.
You can unset 'mark_old' if you don't want the behavior. I've personally never found it super useful. For Maildir, I believe messages will be marked old once they're out of the 'new' directory. w
