Hi,
I finally managed to solve that annoying status flag problem. Though, I still have a
few questions (see below)...
Firstly, mutt wasn't responsible for the missing flags in its message index. Nor were
any mail notifiers causing havoc. When in X11 I use glbiff and mutt without any
problems.
The reason for all my troubles seems to be one of the mailservers I poll my mail from.
After an insane amount of testing (nothing is worse than not knowing what to look for
;) I discovered that all mail coming from that server has the following header field
included:
Status: R
which made mutt interpret the message as read. I found out how mutt normally deals
with this. When a new message arrives there usually is no "Status:" field in the
message header. When mutt is invoked it appends the following fields to header:
Status: O
Content-Length: 38
Lines: 3
the values above are an example. The O (for Old) indicates that the message (was new
and) hasn't been read (=looked at with the pager), yet. When a message has been read,
mutt inserts an "R" in the status field:
Status: RO
from that point onwards the message will be regarded as read and mutt will move it
around according to an mbox-hook command for example.
When a message is replied to mutt adds another field to the header:
X-Status: A
"A" is for answered I suppose.
Back to my problem: my solution is a procmail rule that simply renames the offending
header field to "Old-Staus: R". Mutt now happily writes its own "Status:" field and
handles the message accordingly.
A few questions remain, though:
1) RFC822 doesn't mention the "Status:" header field, where is this documented?
2) How is it (or not) related to status fields of Delivery Status Notification
messages containing DSN codes as defined RFC1894 ?
3) If this header field is only intended for mutt's internal use why are two different
fields "Status:" and "X-Status:" being used? Doesn't RFC822 define
"X-userdefinedheader" for such purposes?
4) Mutt seems to strip the headers it creates (see above) when resending/replying
messages. Has anybody else seen incoming messages with a "Status:" header field like
the one I described above?
Any input would be appreciated :)
cheers,
-Marcos
--
"Give me a ping Vasilij. One ping only, please."
"Aye captain."
