Hi all In connection to my earlier postings, I did some more testing and I'm pretty sure that I tracked down a kind of pathological test case to reproduce the issue. I also found that the source of the problem I'm seeing is actually connected to my first post about the check-new function.
Here is what I did. Set up two mailboxes foo/, bar/. Enter foo/ and leave back to the browser (important). While having mutt open *and* being in the browser, send mail to the two boxes. Just for the record, I did echo lala | mail -s to_foo <user>@<localhost> echo lala | mail -s to_bar <user>@<localhost> and in my .procmailrc as first entries :0 * ^Subject:.*to_foo.* foo/ :0 * ^Subject:.*to_bar.* bar/ Now, invoke check-new (in my case hit `n': 'bind browser n check-new'). And now the thing: (1) The 'N' flag appears *only* for bar/, not for the last-visited foo/. (2) Choose any mailbox but foo/, hit Return to enter it, and find yourself in foo/. This works vice versa if bar/ was visited last. I also have set timeout=2 set mail_check=20 The issue turns up always, regardless of whether I wait $timeout+$mail_check seconds before invoking check-new or not, but *only* if I do use check-new. So, from what I see, mutt (at least mine) does not flag the last-visited mailbox correctly when I use check-new and does open it, although I selected another one. And now here another, related problem. After reading some more docs I began to imagine that actually most users seem to work like so: have one mailbox open (not the browser) and change directly to other mailboxes, not via the browser. I tried that and I was surprised. That works exactly as I expected. I got informed by a message "New mail in ..." after $timeout+$mail_check seconds automatically and without pressing a key. This brings me back to my fist posting. Apparently mutt's check-for-new-mail-and-inform-me machinery works like a charm ... but from what I see only if I'm in the message index of an open mailbox, and not in the browser, i.e. the 'N' flag does not appear "automatically" just as the "New mail in ..." messages do. Why is this so. Is this intended behavior? Does anybody else have this issue (besides Raffi Khatchadourian) or am I just not using mutt the "mutt way"? Thanks. s.