Emacs: how to remove "unread" tag while reading emails

[Jani Nikula]

On Sat, 05 Oct 2013, Austin Clements <amdragon at MIT.EDU> wrote:
> One of the problems with the current approach, which most of these
> options share, is that there's no feedback.  For example, when I enter
> a thread, I have no idea if the first message was unread or not.

Agreed. And this gets repeated for navigating messages within the
thread. Very annoying. This should be fixed.

Two other things I find annoying:

* I often find myself glancing at the first few lines of the message to
  decide whether I want to read it now or later (potentially never). I
  still want the unread information be retained if I decide to archive
  or move on to the next thread, so I often end up restoring the unread
  tag. So the marking as read is too eager.

* I sometimes use the arrow keys and page down/up to read through
  messages, and this leaves messages unread even though I've read
  them. So the marking as read is not eager enough.

> I'd like a solution that either naturally doesn't have this problem,
> that visually indicates that a message *was* unread, or that delays
> all unread marking until you leave the thread (possibly combined with
> a visual indication of what will be marked unread).  Bonus points if
> it's easy to adjust what happens, such as saying "keep everything
> unread" or "keep everything unread except this one".

I'd like to have the visual indication.

> To this end, here are my two proposals:
>
> A1) Mark whole thread read when you leave it (via q, X, A or friends)
> and provide a binding to leave a thread without marking it read (C-x k
> would do, but we should provide an explicit one; perhaps C-u prefixing
> other "leave" bindings?  For once, C-u is easy to remember because u
> is the first letter of unread).

I think I'd like to keep this message based instead of thread
based. However it's very difficult to know for sure until one actually
gets to try it.

I do switch between show buffers (for example, while reading a message,
I need to check something from another message) and the marking as read
might get lost. Also, it's not clear to me what happens if you refresh
the buffer and new messages show up in the thread. Again, difficult to
know in advance.


My message based proposal:

Don't do anything when you enter a message. This keeps the unread tag
visible if it's there.

Mark each message as read on actions you do when the point already is
within the message: n/N/p/P/SPC/a/x/A/X/q/r/R/f (others?), arrow keys,
and page up/down, *unless* the action is prefixed with C-u.

Collapsed messages would never be marked as read. RET to expand would
mark as read.

This still does not provide visual indication of the removal of the
unread tag in a way that would be always visible. But I think it's more
important to know whether the message *was* unread before or not.


Here's a proposal independent of the marking-as-read topic that would
help with the visual indication:

We currently set header-line-format (the top header in show view) to the
subject of the first message. The usefulness of the header line could be
improved a lot. We could make it reflect the message the point is
currently on, with user configurable format not unlike
notmuch-search-result-format. Including tags. And this would provide
visual indication for marking as read when the message header is not
visible. The header would also help in navigating long threads with long
messages.

> In either case, I'd like an echo message when I leave the thread
> telling me what happened ("Thread marked as read", "First 3 messages
> marked as read; thread archived", etc.).  These would blend especially
> well with undo, because they would bundle together all read marking
> into a single action that would make sense to undo ("Thread marked as
> read [C-/ to undo]").

This might be useful with the message based approach, although it might
be too verbose, and a new annoyance...


BR,
Jani.