gnus in an IMAP multi-client setup.

[Daniel Corbe]

I hope this is the right place to ask for general advice. gnus makes an
awesome news reader and with all the performance gains with the version
of gnus distributed with emacs24 I'd like to use it as an IMAP mail
reader as well.

I need gnus to behave in a cooperative way with other IMAP clients.
gnus is marking entire folders as read as soon as I open them
up in the group summary buffer. This is undesirable behavior, because
then my other IMAP clients also show the message marked as read.

Can someone point me in the right direction? I'd like to be able to
manually toggle the read status of a message or even have it done
automatically -- but only after I've viewed the message.

-Daniel

[William Gardella]

Daniel,

Could we see your setup? How are you accessing IMAP mail?

I use my two IMAP accounts as secondary select methods and they don't
mark mail as read (technically, set the IMAP Seen flag) until I have either
actually read them or told Gnus to mark them as read. The two accounts
are set up like this:


(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
'((nnimap "imap.pitt.edu"
(nnimap-server-port 993)
(nnimap-stream ssl)
(nnir-search-engine imap))
(nnimap "imap.gmail.com"
(nnimap-server-port 993)
(nnimap-stream ssl)
(nnir-search-engine imap))))

I have experienced behavior like you describe when experimenting with
Fetchmail as an IMAP retrieval agent, however. Fetchmail rudely sets
Seen when it fetches. It's a very good reason not to use Fetchmail for
IMAP; if you like that sort of utility, better to use getmail or
offlineimap, which behave more properly from an IMAP standpoint.

[Daniel Corbe]

I had the sort of the opposite configuration in place. nnimap was my
primary select method. Making nnimap my secondary select method seems
to have stopped it from making *eveything* in my IMAP folder as read;
however, now nothing is being marked as read after I read the mail message.

For posterity, here's all my gnus-affecting settings:

(custom-set-variables
'(send-mail-function (quote smtpmail-send-it))
'(smtpmail-smtp-server "smtpcorp.com")
'(smtpmail-smtp-service 2525))

(setq user-mail-address "co...@corbe.net")
(setq user-full-name "Daniel Corbe")

(setq gnus-select-method
'(nntp "us.news.astraweb.com"))

(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
'((nnimap "apollo.corbe.net"
(nnimap-address "apollo.corbe.net")
(nnimap-authenticator login)
(nnimap-server-port 1143)
(nnimap-stream network)
(nnimap-expunge-on-close 'never))))

(setq gnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixed nil)
(setq mm-text-html-renderer 'w3m)
(setq mm-inline-text-html-with-images t)
(setq mm-inline-text-html-with-w3m-keymap nil)

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Daniel Corbe <co...@corbe.net> writes:

> I need gnus to behave in a cooperative way with other IMAP clients.
> gnus is marking entire folders as read as soon as I open them
> up in the group summary buffer.

That sounds like a bug -- Gnus isn't supposed to do that. Do you have
any major customisations on group-entry behaviour in effect?

--
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen