Re: [Evolution] mark_seen confusion

[Carl Schaefer <schaefer trilug org>]

On Tue, 2014-05-13 at 21:04 +0100, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-05-13 at 15:44 -0400, Carl Schaefer wrote:
> > it's been bothering me that simply visiting a new folder will mark a
> > message in that folder as "seen", so I wandered into
> > mail/e-mail-reader.c to see if anything could be done.
>
> It's easy to prevent this by unsetting the Mark Messages Read box in
> Mail Preferences. I always unset it and then explicitly mark messages as
> read as I deal with them.

maybe I should try that approach, it would probably help me keep my
inbox manageable.  However, I still think the current behavior with
"Mark Messages Read" checked is buggy.

> Note that Seen and Read are two different things.

perhaps in IMAP, but in evolution they appear to be the same, or at
least used interchangeably at times.  For example, the "Mark Messages
Read" preferences checkbox sets a dconf element called mark-seen.

> > This is in the EMailReaderPrivate structure, indicating that the
> > behavior that's bothering me isn't supposed to be happening:
> >
> >         /* These flags work together to prevent message selection
> >          * restoration after a folder switch from automatically
> >          * marking the message as read.  We only want that to
> >          * happen when the -user- selects a message. */
> >         guint folder_was_just_selected : 1;
> >         guint restoring_message_selection : 1;
> >         guint avoid_next_mark_as_seen : 1;
>
> This seems to be more for the Evolution Hackers list rather than this
> one, however you haven't said exactly what you're trying to achieve.

I'd like the behavior described in the comment above, i.e. switching
folders doesn't automatically mark a message as read.  Maybe I'm
confused about what that really means, but it seems to me that evolution
doesn't currently behave that way.

thanks for the pointer to evolution-hackers, I didn't know about it.
Carl