Re: Unseen attribute doesn't get saved in rmail

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Andrea G. Monaco" <andrea.monaco@autistici.org>
> Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 22:33:14 +0100
> 
> 
>   > Why does it matter for your purposes?
> 
> I usually don't delete my mail, I just read it, so it's important for me
> to keep track of read mail. For this use case, which I think is pretty
> common, clearing the unseen flag in a message should set the modified
> flag for the RMAIL buffer.
> 
> Otherwise I have to manually set the flag in order to save the file, if
> I understand correctly. That seems like an unnecessary workaround.

That's not what I asked about.  You are describing your original
motivation for raising this issue, but I was specifically asking about
this part of your response to my proposal of a solution:

> But I wonder if that workaround is enough: I saw that the hook is called
> at the end of the function rmail-show-message-1, but after the snippet
> that I posted the information I care about is lost: we don't know if the
> mail was just read for the first time or not; so we can't set the
> modified flag meaningfully.

I'm asking why is it important for your purposes to know whether the
mail was read for the first time or not.  Because if it isn't very
important, the solution I proposed should work for you.

In general, your use case is very unusual one, so much so that I was
originally certain that's not the behavior I see, because I never read
any batch of new messages without deleting or filing away at least one
of them.  That's the reason Rmail doesn't already have the feature you
want: I guess no one else uses it as you do.  (It means, btw, that
your inbox is growing without limitation, which is also not a good
idea.)