Re: Tagging messages sometimes causes them to be marked as old

[David Bremner <bremner@unb.ca>]

Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri <andreas.kahari@abc.se> writes:

> What's so special about the new tags that I'm adding that makes the
> unread messages move from "new" to "cur"?  I can *see* them getting
> moved when I run the tagging.  Why is notmuch moving them?  The "unread"
> tag never changes.
>
> 	$ ls "$notmuch_dbdir"/abc/INBOX/new
> 	1693487404_0.62384.harpo.local,U=352958,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
> 	1693488604_2.29495.harpo.local,U=352962,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
> 	1693488604_4.29495.harpo.local,U=352964,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
> 	1693488604_5.29495.harpo.local,U=352965,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,

Apparently this is intended behaviour (from test/T340-maildir-sync.sh)

    test_begin_subtest "Message in new with maildir info is moved to cur on any tag change"
    add_message [filename]='message-with-info-to-be-moved-to-cur:2,' [dir]=new
    notmuch tag +anytag id:$gen_msg_id
    output=$(cd "$MAIL_DIR"; ls */message-with-info-to-be-moved-to-cur*)
    test_expect_equal "$output" "cur/message-with-info-to-be-moved-to-cur:2,"

That behaviour is about 10 years old. It seems to be based on the idea
that files in new/ should not have maildir info. According to the
standard [1] (such as it is)

        When you move a file from new to cur, you have to change its
        name from uniq to uniq:info. Make sure to preserve the uniq
        string, so that separate messages can't bump into each other.

So in a sense notmuch is "fixing" the maildir. Whether that intervention
is needed notmuch to work correctly, I'm not sure.

I'd be a bit nervous about changing such an established behaviour of
notmuch, but I guess can't completely rule it out without knowing what
would break.

Maybe you can convince whatever puts files in new/ not to add :2, ?

[1]: http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html