Re: Rmail tips

[Colin Baxter]

>>>>> Ben Hancock <ben@benghancock.com> writes:

    > [Colin wrote:]
    >>>> I filter incoming mail by means of procmail and then read the
    >>>> mailboxes using "rmail-input". This might be too simple for
    >>>> what you want, of course.

    > [Ben replied:]
    >>> This seems like a fine approach and I've tried a similar setup;
    >>> my issue was that new messages in these inboxes weren't treated
    >>> as "unseen" by rmail, so it was hard to distinguish new mail.

    > [Then Colin responded:]
    >> I don't know if it's possible in rmail to "flag" an email as
    >> unread. There is a variable "rmail-unseen-attr-index" with a
    >> default value of 6. Maybe it's possible to use that, but I've
    >> never tried.

    > This was a good clue. Rmail recognizes a set of email labels or
    > "attributes" that have special meaning[1], including "unseen" (or
    > unread). After digging into rmail.el and looking at my mail
    > headers more closely, it looks like each message that is read into
    > rmail-file-name via the 'rmail' command is given a special header
    > that looks like this:

    >     X-RMAIL-ATTRIBUTES: --------

    > When a message is "unseen", the dash at position 6 (zero-indexed)
    > gets a special "U" flag, changing the header to this:

    >     X--RMAIL-ATTRIBUTES: ------U-

    > Rmail treats these messages differently; it will default to
    > opening the first unseen message when reading a file into rmail,
    > and unseen messages get a different face in the summary buffer so
    > they stand out.

I never knew that. I get the X-RMAIL-ATTRIBUTES header but not the `U'
on messages that are definitely unseen. Is there some variable that must
be set to actually see these attributes?

Best wishes,

Colin.