marking a message as "read"

[Kevin J. McCarthy]

On Fri, Sep 06, 2019 at 03:23:05PM +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote:
>I've some confusion about "read" and "unread" versus "old" and "new".
>
>There are status flags for new and old. Unread messages seem to be 
>new, but if I read a message it doesn't acquire an "(O)ld" flag, 
>though it loses its "(N)ew" flag.

Both "new" and "old" are "unread".  "read" means neither new nor old.

>I've skimmed the manual, and i can't see what the criteria are for 
>considering a message New or Old.

$mark_old controls this when exiting a mailbox.  You can also manually 
toggle "old" via <set-flag> or <clear-flag>.

<toggle-new> also works, but it follows the path:
   old  ==>  new  <==>  unread
An old message will be toggled to new.  new/unread toggle between each 
other.

>It's easy to find these messages, but I can't see how to mark them as 
>"read". I can mark threads and subthreads as read, but not individual 
>messages.

<toggle-new> and <set-flag>/<clear-flag> work for individual messages as 
well as tagged ones.

If you have both "new" and "old" messages in the mailbox and want to 
clear both of them (marking them as read), I would suggest using 
something like
   <tag-pattern>~U<enter><tag-prefix-cond><clear-flag>O
Clearing "old" will actually set both "new" and "old" messages to 
"read".

-- 
Kevin J. McCarthy
GPG Fingerprint: 8975 A9B3 3AA3 7910 385C  5308 ADEF 7684 8031 6BDA
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