Subject: Re: New mail?

From: "Russ Atkind" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 16:38:46 -0400

--On Monday, May 11, 1998, 10:14 AM -0700 "Mark Crispin"
<[email-masked]> wrote: 

> On Mon, 11 May 1998 08:43:56 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time), John C Klensin
> wrote:
>> The spec is, of course, painfully clear (section 4.4.4, page
>> 39): "NEW  Messages that have the \Recent flag set but not the
>> \Seen flag.  This is functionally equivalent to '(RECENT
>> UNSEEN)'"
> 
> To play devil's advocate here:
> 
> The issue of whether a message is "new" or "not new" is a user interface
> issue.  The definition of the "NEW" SEARCH criterion is based upon what
the
> author of the IMAP specification thinks is "new message status" (as
opposed to
> "recent message status" or "unseen message status") and does not
necessarily
> reflect what the designers of other user interfaces think.
> 
> One should be careful to infer user interface semantics from protocol
tokens.
> "NEW" is the same as "BLURDYBLOOP" -- it is something for another computer
to
> recognize.  Great evil has happened in inferring semantics from a protocol
> token above and beyond that.

-- On the same day, later, Barry Leiba <whatever> wrote:

> Worse, if mail comes in while I'm logged on at home, then whether my home 
> or work session sees it as "recent" will be at the whim of the server -- 
> whichever session it happens to notify first, which, with most clients, 
> means whichever one happens to send a command to the server first and get 
> the "* n EXISTS" and "* m RECENT" messages in response.  That makes the 
> behaviour of "recent" rather capricious in the case at hand.

Right, exactly.  You know, what constitutes a new message is something that
really might be better off left to users, yet I've yet to see a mail client
that makes it configurable.

      I am actually a little surprised at the fact that people seem to want
\Recent to be some part of the new-message picture.  Without even
considering protocol issues, I've always thought -- from the days of BBSs --
that new messages are just messages you have not read yet.  That's kind of
classically how they're defined, isn't it?  BBSs would then also give you
the option to "set new messages to old" when you logged off (you used to do
that more instead of logging out).  That in particular makes more sense when
you don't necessarily want to read every single message.  When you do want
to read every message, which is basically the case with email -- of course
there's spam, but the whole reason why spam is a pain in the butt is because
you want to want to read every message you receive -- don't you want a
message to be considered new until you read it, regardless of where it
arrived first, regardless even of whether you yourself have already seen
that the message exists but haven't had time to open it?
      I'm sure different people would want it different ways -- but don't
you think that the majority would go for not \Seen?  (this is to be taken in
an inquisitive, not a coercive, tone of voice.)

Russ

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 13:44:27 -0700 (PDT)

On Mon, 11 May 1998 16:38:46 -0400, Russ Atkind wrote:
> \Recent to be some part of the new-message picture.

Some people really do want to make a distinction between "new mail", "mail
that has recently arrived but has been read", "old mail that I haven't
bothered reading yet", and "old mail".

Although I'm a member of the Pine team, I am annoyed that Pine doesn't make
this distinction, and I frequently use a GUI MUA (MailManager), that I wrote
myself, which has that distinction.

> Without even
> classically how they're defined, isn't it?

BBSs are not the only historical precedent.  Nor are they the oldest.  The
concept of "recent" vs. "seen" in MUAs goes back at least to the 1970s.  Some
of us old farts actually ended up getting used to it.

> When you do want

No.  Some messages are intentionally deferred; I've looked at the browser
line, but I decided not to read it now.  This is very common when I'm remote
and I pick out the urgent messages.  When I get back, I want to go to the new
messages first, to see if there is anything urgent, before wading through the
hundreds of old non-urgent but yet unread messages which piled up.

> you think that the majority would go for not \Seen?

If that's what you want, choose an MUA that does that.  As I said, Pine does.
But given my druthers, I'd prefer to have the four-way choice, and I really
wish that I could persuade my co-workers to give me a preference option that
does that......  ;-)

With the four-way distinction in IMAP, the MUA has a choice.  If IMAP only had
seen vs. unseen, the MUA would not have a choice.