[Hardcider] Read/Unread count in Mail.app

[Tarus Balog]

Gang:

There was a post on TriLUG about the lack of activity on this list, so I
thought I'd throw this out:

Okay, I've really tried to nail this one down. Macosxhints, Google, the
works. If I've missed something, please spank me, send me the URL and
I'll be on my way.

I like Mail.app. I like that it integrates well with Address Book and
iCal. But ... (you knew there was a but, didn't you)

I am a mail power user. I use IMAPS and have about 2GB of mail on the
server. The server is a Debian sarge box running dovecot.

Everything was fine until Tiger. Now, the problem I have is that
messages I have read, and show read in the client, magically go back to
unread. It is pretty random how this happens. Big mail folders, small
mail folders, inbox - it happens in all of them.

I can go to a mail folder, read a new message, click on the folder above
it, go back to the first folder and the message will be highlighted, the
text is in the preview pane ... and it is marked unread.

Doesn't happen all of the time, but once a message gets in this state it
tends to stay there unless I delete it or clear it via Squirrelmail or
another mail client.

I thought the problem might be that I was running dovecot and mbox.
Since Tiger stores the messages individually for Spotlight, I thought
that perhaps it was a problem because mbox stored everything in one
file. So I migrated the server to use Maildir.

Still no love.

So today I blew away everything and started over. Blew away the Cache,
the plist file and the Mail directory. Things are better. I did some
tests where I would use Squirrelmail to browse to the directory, see the
unread message, read it in Mail.app, and refresh Squirrelmail to see it
marked as read.

But it didn't last. I'm still getting the random read message marked as
unread. I even looked for some sort of Rule I could create to mark the
message as read after I read it, but there isn't a trigger for "has been
read".

Note that (after the initial sync) the Activity Viewer is quiet when
this happens. I'm using just the defaults as far as the mail account is
concerned as well.

This does not happen in Thunderbird, and I think I'm going to end up
using it instead of Mail.app permanently. But it doesn't integrate with
Address Book and iCal, and iCal won't let me respond to an invitation
using anything other than Mail.app. I'm pretty happy with Thunderbird
but I'm hamstring in that I really would like to respond to iCal
invitations with it versus Mail.app, so if anyone has a solution to
that, it would also, in a way, solve my problem.

So: Clean Mail.app install on the latest Tiger (10.4.7). Server is
dovecot on Debian Sarge configured for Maildir. Problem is read messages
are marked as unread.

Clues?

I'm willing to go to Cyrus if I have to, but the mbox to Maildir
transistion was scary enough and I'd rather not if it can be avoided.

-T
-- 

Tarus Balog
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