Mail to self

Leo Gaspard notmuchmail.org at leo.gaspard.io
Sun Oct 28 00:31:20 PDT 2018


> After a discussion on IRC, my understanding is the following. The
> underlying behaviour that Leo is objecting to is that if any one file
> with a given message-id has the ,S maildir flag, then when notmuch syncs
> maildir flags to tags, it will remove the unread tag from that
> message-id. After some back and forth and thinking about it, I think
> notmuch's current behaviour is actually correct (given the constraint
> that tags attach to message-ids). You could argue for different ways of
> resolving conflicts for maildir flags in general, but the ",S" or "seen"
> flag has fairly natural common sense semantics.

I can confirm this is my issue. My thinking is that if any file does not
have the ,S maildir flag, then I would prefer the mail to be marked as
unread, as a read mail that is spuriously marked as unread is a small
inconvenience, while an unread mail that is spuriously marked as read
can have huge consequences.

Actually, I just noticed while writing this mail that I had setup a
sieve filter for duplicate email that put them in a “Duplicate” folder
and automatically marks them as “read”, so that at the same time they
wouldn't bother me in the thunderbird interface but I could still check
dovecot's duplicate detection didn't have false positives.

This behaviour of notmuch thus made me miss 9 emails in the 2 weeks I've
been using it, the oldest being 12 days ago, without any warning. Well,
now I know about it and can try to change my setup (except I can't
really touch this sieve filter as other people rely on it), but…

If this is a willing choice, I'd be glad were it revisited :)


More information about the notmuch mailing list