Bob Newell <bobnew...@bobnewell.net> writes: > This goes well beyond my very limited knowledge so I did an > experiment. I went to the gmail web interface and found an > already-opened message in the All Mail folder (really a label) > that I knew for certain I had originally opened in gnus, so > therefore gnus would have known about the message. I marked > it unread (on the web) and moved it back to INBOX. > > Then I started up gnus and gnus saw the message as an unread > INBOX message. Based on this it appears the answer is yes, > gnus did update the status of this previously seen email. > However I don't know how much if any status information gnus > actually keeps (and I don't use the registry) so this may or > may not be meaningless. It certainly seems as if, when > reopening the group subsequent to shutting down gnus at some > point, gnus gets a fresh set of information.
Thanks for doing this experiment. I hoped for that result. AFAIU Gnus stores such stuff in a file named ".newsrc.eld" (AFAIR ".newsrc.el" in older Emacs versions). And indeed, among other things there seems to be information about "seen" status of messages in that file, as well as saved status, ticked and dormant status, all of that Gnus specific stuff, but nothing related to the "read" (or "old") status. So I guess the "read" status is fetched every time when you open the group, along with the rest (list of existing messages etc). Thx, Michael.
