What set of message flags does mutt use to indicate a N[ew] message?

[Chris Green]

I'm trying to work out why some of my messages (in mbox) get flagged as
'N' when they're not.  

So, how does mutt decide that a message is 'N'?  There isn't an explicit
flag indicating this so it must be some combination of absence of
Status: and X-Status: flags.

Can anyone tell me what it is please.


... and presumably mutt only locks the mbox when it writes to it, so
while one is actually looking at a message and/or composing a reply the
mbox is unlocked and available for the MTA to add messages.  Mutt will
only lock the mbox when it writes a new message to it or modifies or
deletes an existing one.


I obviously have some misconfiguration or disagreement between my MTA
and mutt (the MTA is actually a python filtering script, it does use the
proper python library for delivering messages to mbox though).

-- 
Chris Green

Re: What set of message flags does mutt use to indicate a N[ew] message?

[Erik Christiansen]

On 19.03.13 10:29, Chris Green wrote:
> So, how does mutt decide that a message is 'N'?  There isn't an explicit
> flag indicating this so it must be some combination of absence of
> Status: and X-Status: flags.
> 
> Can anyone tell me what it is please.

Last time I looked at that, I made these notes:

Status: (mbox format)
   Mutt uses e.g. "Status: RO" to flag that a mail is "Read" and "Old"
   Absence of a "Status:" header causes mutt to flag the mail as "New".

There doesn't seem to be any description of this internal detail in the manual,
so that's as close as I've come to working out what it does. (Based only
on observation, not digging through the code.)

Erik

-- 
You will stop at nothing to reach your objective, but only because your
brakes are defective.

Re: What set of message flags does mutt use to indicate a N[ew] message?

[David Champion]

* On 19 Mar 2013, Erik Christiansen wrote: 
> 
> Status: (mbox format)
>Mutt uses e.g. "Status: RO" to flag that a mail is "Read" and "Old"
>Absence of a "Status:" header causes mutt to flag the mail as "New".

This is correct, for mbox (aka UNIX v7).  For Maildir and MH, IIRC, it's
a matter of filesystem location and perhaps, for Maildir, flags in the
filename.  (MH filenames are always integers with no flags.)

So to make a message 'new' via procmail, you want to delete the Status:
header.

-- 
David Champion • d...@bikeshed.us