New message preservation

[Jared Rhine <jared@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm a brand new offlineimap user, running Debian 3.99.1 against a
remote Courier-IMAP.

I'm pleased so far; the migration went smoothly enough for it to take
me a number of hours to notice the only real problem I've had.

I've basically lost all management of "new" messages (IMAP Unseen
status, I think).  Mail is delivered to my remote server fine; if I
don't pull the message, then new messages are marked unseen, and when
I point my mail user agent at the server and fetch new messages, they
have a "new" mark, and the mail reader jumps to the new messages..

When the messages are pulled to my local server via offlineimap, and I
point my user agent at the local maildir, there are no new message
markers, so it's harder to read my inboxes.

I haven't traced the exact sequence yet.  Perhaps when offlineimap
pulls the new messages, they are pulled with the unseen flag.  But
then my remote server marked them as seen, so the _next_ sync, they
get marked seen locally.

So you may be thinking "of course, everything is working properly".
But maybe it's not.  I was surprised that I didn't see any messages in
the mail archives on this topic, so I may be unique in this.

I could bang my head on this a little bit, but I'd rather get guidance
from the experts here.  Has anyone else experienced this issue?  Is it
considered a problem?  When exactly are my local files been marked as
seen?  Is offlineimap working the best that it can?  Are there any
technically-incorrect-but-possibly-useful hacks that could be added to
keep that seen bit long enough for it to make it to my MUA?

Thanks for any help.  I'd _really_ like to use offlineimap, but I'm
feeling a productivity hit with the loss of my "new messages"
functionality.

-- jared@xxxxxxxxxxx

"A black hole is where God is dividing by zero."
        -- attributed to Roger Smith