LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : alex@netcraft.com.au
  Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 12:38:57 +0930

Re: procmailrc

Alex,

I used to know all this stuff once.
But basically, I think that e-mail gets sent through
procmail as is, with no Status line.

Once the e-mail comes under the control of a 
mail reader such as "mail", which is what I use,
it then gets a pseudo-header line appended to
the real mail headers.

It looks like

O = old (i.e. it was already in the mailbox
	when the mailbox was last read)
R = read

Therefore my mail-reader shows "N" next to
mails with no Status: pseudo-header, and "U"
next to items with just

Status: O

But items with 

Status: RO

are shown as read.

These conventions go way back into medieval unix history.
I had thought that "elm", which was around
certainly in 1983, which is when I first used "elm"
on a Pyramid computer, should be one of the old
traditional mailers which uses the Status: line
"correctly".

Hmmmm....
I just tried "elm" on my suse6.2 machine with the
same mail folder as the RH5.2 "mail".
Result: elm works correctly.
It shows all the statuses of mails correctly.

Therefore: answer to your questions is:

I'm suggesting that you look at the Status fields in
your Mail/linux mailbos to see
what Status fields you ahve, using "less" or
something to look at the file directly.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

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