On Wed, 2008-04-16 at 07:44 -0700, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
> I have found in certain situations, that Evo sometimes 'un-reads'
> messages before the user actually reads it,
That doesn't make any sense. You seem to be crossing over "read" and
"unread".
> because new messages are the first message read on the current line,
> assuming of course that Evo is running and the account running idle.
I've seen Evolution, and other mail clients, mark the first listed
message as *READ* simply because it's selected by default, and
displayed. Which bears no indication whether you've read it or not.
That's a pain, because any re-arrangement of the message list, and this
"marked as read" but not "actually read" message disappears out of site.
Which can be that's just moved into a different spot in the list, and
you simply lose your place; or you've got a client set with that
annoying "hide all the read messages" feature (so it's not listed, at
all).
All this reminds me of the *STUPIDITY* of various usenet clients, which
play silly buggers with the read flag. You end up being unable to tell
which messages that *YOU'VE* read, because the client is using the flag
for other purposes. There should be separate flagging for read and
ignored messages. Likewise clients should just hide old messages (if
you want them to), without changing their read status.
In short:
* If I read a message, it should be marked as read.
* If I haven't read one, it should not be.
* If I've got a client automatically ignoring some messages, it
should flag them as being ignored, and act on that flag alone
(hide them from site, dull the messages, etc.).
* If I've got a client hiding the older messages from a list, then
it should simply hide them and not play with statuses.
* I can tell which have been read, or not, out of those ignored
messages, should I need to go back and find something (e.g. one
gem in a stupid thread).
* I can opt to stop hiding old messages, if I need to find
something that I missed, and still tell which messages I've read
or not read.
* It's a right pain in the neck trying to find the message that
you missed reading the other week if your client has falsely
marked all of the messages as being read.
> Furthermore, on a different machine where I actually read my messages
> and under Outlook, the messages are all un-read.
Only if you read your mail using something like IMAP will two different
clients be able to tell what's a read message from an unread message.
And, often, only is you do not use the clients simultaneously.
Evolution seems to write the statuses on exit, and if it doesn't exit
nicely, the last set of statuses that should change, aren't changed.
--
(This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's
important to the thread.)
Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.
