Re: interesting, but...

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 04:15:32PM -0400, Neal D. Becker wrote:

> I have mail on my ISP's imap server.  I want to be able to read from
> work or home.  Right now, I run fetchmail at work from cron, so while

This sounds like a perfect situation for OfflineIMAP.

> Then I run offlineimap again, and I see it deleted all the mails on
> the server.  Problem is, I didn't actually read them yet.

This should NOT happen.  In fact, I've never seen it do this before, ever. 
Please try running with:

offlineimap -d imap,maildir -1 -o

and mail me the output for a time when it deletes those mails.

Are you sure that you didn't delete the mails in any way?

> So, is this problem solvable?  I guess offlineimap has no way to know
> if I actually _read_ the articles, only that my MUA grabbed them,
> right?

Well, it doesn't really care if you've read them or not.  But it does know. 
Your mail reader will set a "read" flag.  Normally, though, OfflineIMAP will
not delete a message from your IMAP server until you delete the message in
your client MUA.  That is, it synchronizes flags and deletes.  It should
never delete a message that you have not explicitly deleted somewhere.

-- John