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

[Bill Cole]

On 14 Jan 2019, at 17:40, Randall Gellens wrote:

> (I've also complained today that MailMate's display of recent doesn't 
> necessarily match what my IMAP server reports as recent.)

MailMate's display of recent *necessarily doesn't match* what your IMAP 
server reports (to another session) as recent.

What MM reports as the \Recent count for a mailbox and what you see as 
the \Recent count on a subsequent manual session can never match (except 
by random chance) if the server implements \Recent correctly. This is 
why \Recent is useless. Once a session has seen a message as having 
\Recent set, no subsequent session will see it as such. You cannot 
verify the Recent count using telnet or another IMAP client because as 
soon as MM (or any client session) has seen a message as having the 
\Recent flag or a mailbox as having a particular number of \Recent 
messages, no subsequent client session can be shown the same messages in 
that mailbox as being \Recent.

Arguably it is a UI misstep for any IMAP client to expose the \Recent 
flag in any way to the user, because it is so tightly bound to the 
low-level connection management of IMAP. I'm not convinced that it even 
has any internal utility in the minuscule scope of its persistence for a 
client that behaves in a manner that modern users would find acceptable.