[Users] BUG with update marking all email as "read"

[Steven Rostedt]

Anyone else have this issue?

This happens to me quite often, although I know ways of avoiding it
(mostly). When I either "Get Mail" or switch folders which does a get
mail, every so often, all email (but the new ones coming in) get marked
as "read". This gets quite annoying since I use "unread" for email I
want to look at again in the near future. Now, as I get an average of
100 emails a day in my INBOX (this does not count folders), and I
currently have 25,940 emails in my INBOX where 3217 of them are unread,
I really need the email to stay unread, until I say that it's read.

I've come to the point where I need to backup my email to a separate
file every hour or so, such that when they all get marked as read, I
can do a diff -u on it and patch my INBOX to put back the messages that
were read. Of course, I lose read and deleted marks for email that was
within that hour.

I'm using claws-mail 3.11.1, but this has been happening for some time,
which means this is not a new bug.

Here's my setup:

I use fetchmail/procmail to pull down my email from my ISP and place
them into folders. I use dovecot as a local IMAP server on my LAN to
read my email from all my clients.

The bug happens when mail is being fetched on the server and claws-mail
decides to update a folder. I noticed that when this happens, all email
becomes "read" except the new email, but the folder still says there's
"unread" messages. Then there's a pause, and the folder updates to only
"unread" of the new email.

I turned off auto update, although if you switch folders, when you
enter a new one, it does the update. If I disable fetchmail from
pulling down new email, I can switch folders all I want and there's no
issue. There's some kind of race between the claws update and the
pulling of new email in dovecot.

This only happens with claws-mail. I can read my email from evolution,
k-9, mutt, and alpine all fine. But claws-mail has the tendency of
flagging everything as unread.

When I was able to tame my email and keep my INBOX down to 6000 emails
or less, I did not have this problem. I'm guessing that the 25000
emails I have is opening up a race window.

I downloaded the source, and if I get time I'll see if I can find the
bug myself, but if anyone else has any ideas, it would be much
appreciated.

Thanks!

-- Steve