Dear fellow nerds,

I recently started to use aerc, synched locally with mbsync. Unfortunately, I’m facing a rather annoying problem with Gmail:

  • I read emails (flag “seen”) and move them to the archive;
  • run the mbsync < account > command to sync;
  • the mails are correctly moved, however, they seem to lose the “seen” flag, and they revert to unread.

Am I missing something? Any idea what could be the problem? If it matters, I’m on a Wayland session on NixOS.

Thanks!

  • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
    1·
    18 days ago

    That “U=xxx” is the IMAP UID, which is a unique identifier that message has in the IMAP mailbox. mbsync adds that to the filename just so it can track which (local) message corresponds to what message on the IMAP server.

    When moving a message from one mailbox (folder) to another, this UID changes, because it’s per-mailbox only. If you read the manpage for mbsync, it says explicitly that the MUA should strip the U=xxx when moving between maildirs, so the behavior of aerc here is correct.

    In order to get to the bottom of this, you’d probably have to enable the debug output of mbsync and look at exactly what IMAP commands it sends to Gmail, then decipher the relevant command(s) by looking at the RFC, and then decide whether it’s Gmail or mbsync’s fault this gets lost. You could also contact the mbsync devs with this I guess.

    I found someone complaining about the same issue, without getting a reply, 7 years ago, except that person was using mutt: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52218254/isync-mbsync-on-gmail-marks-mail-as-new-after-move-to-another-folder

    That doesn’t help you obviously but from this we might guess it’s probably not aerc’s fault.