geeky question on read/unread mail

[Thomas Cameron]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony Dietrich" <td at transoft.demon.co.uk>
To: "For users of Fedora Core releases" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 4:10 AM
Subject: Re: geeky question on read/unread mail


> On Monday 03 Jan 2005 04:08, Globe Trotter wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> How do all these mailers tell whether an e-mail has actually been read or
>> not? By that, I mean, how does pine (or sylpheed or whatever) find out if
>> an e-mail has actually been read? Please note that I am not asking how 
>> they
>> indicate whether an e-mail has been read or not (this is different for
>> different mailers) but how to they find out whether each e-mail in the
>> folder should be classified as unread or read.
>>
>> This may well depend on format (MH or mbox or the like) but I still 
>> wonder
>> how this is settled.
>>
>> Thanks and best wishes!
>>
> If I understand correctly what you are asking, then the answer is that 
> each
> email reader keeps an internal record of whether you have viewed the 
> emails.
>
> You can verify this by running two separate mail readers pointing at the 
> same
> mail directory ... each reader will show the emails as read/unread 
> depending
> on whether you have seen the email in that particular reader.
> -- 
> Tony Dietrich

That's not entirely correct.  If you use Courier IMAP then the message file 
is actually renamed.

Thomas