[MlMt] Mailbox count = Recent doesn't match server's \Recent count

[Bill Cole]

On 14 Jan 2019, at 13:04, Randall Gellens wrote:

>>>>>> When the displayed count for a mailbox is "Recent," what does MM 
>>>>>> count?
>>>
>>> It counts emails having the IMAP `\Recent` flag. This is not as 
>>> useful as it might seem to be.
>>
>> Exactly; the IMAP \Recent flag is not much use.
>
> Aside from the fact that the IMAP \Recent flag is not inherently 
> useful, the MailMate displayed count does not match what the server 
> says.  All my mailboxes show non-zero counts when the counter is set 
> to "Recent," but as a test I used telnet to connect to my server and 
> SELECT a mailbox that MailMate displays "215" when the counter is set 
> to Recent.  When I SELECT that mailbox, the server reports 0 Recent:

You've just *discovered* why \Recent is intrinsically useless for any 
client usage model involving multiple connections.

Quoting RFC 3501:

         \Recent
            Message is "recently" arrived in this mailbox.  This session
            is the first session to have been notified about this
            message; if the session is read-write, subsequent sessions
            will not see \Recent set for this message.  This flag can 
not
            be altered by the client.

            If it is not possible to determine whether or not this
            session is the first session to be notified about a message,
            then that message SHOULD be considered recent.

            If multiple connections have the same mailbox selected
            simultaneously, it is undefined which of these connections
            will see newly-arrived messages with \Recent set and which
            will see it without \Recent set.


Heisenberg and Schroedinger would love \Recent.