On Wed, Aug 03, 2022 at 10:04:37AM -0700, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 03, 2022 at 10:12:39AM -0400, [email protected] wrote:
> > So, even though I have renumbered all of my emails to be 1-10000, mutt
> > still sees the deleted former-email numbered 56789 and uses that in the
> > "next message number" process.
>
> > In other words ... was this done on purpose ... and if so, why?
> 
> Perhaps Mutt was concerned about a client that might "undelete" by just
> removing the leading ',', but I don't know without more research.

This was my immediate reaction as well, and indeed this post suggests
that is exactly how undelete is handled for mh mail (when possible):

  https://rand-mh.sourceforge.io/book/mh/rem.html

Though it does talk about manually finding new message numbers if need
be.

I don't use mh mail with Mutt (or at all) but presumably Mutt wants mh
folders to work like other types.  So you delete messages, Mutt puts
',' in front of the file name.  You undelete, Mutt moves the file back
to its original name without the comma.  You expunge and Mutt deletes
all the files starting with a comma.  Would need to read the code (for
the first time) to confirm, but it's a plausible and sensible
explanation.

I suppose the most important detail would be what the mh tools (or
procmail, or whatever you're using to deliver the messages) do when
delivering new mail to those folders...  Does it skip numbers on
messages starting with a comma, or not?  The other consideration would
be, does anything care about the message number?  In other words, if
you undelete a message, and it gets a new message number, different
from its original message number, does that negatively impact anything
that might have known about the old message number?  If messages are
routinely renumbered, I'm guessing not, but I wouldn't know.  Does
header cache work with mh, and would that be impacted?

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
-=-=-=-=-
This message is posted from an invalid address.  Replying to it will result in
undeliverable mail due to spam prevention.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

Reply via email to