Re: Pine sorting

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your informative response. I have some questions inline.

On Sun, 12 Mar 2006, roubles wrote:
Pine, by default, sorts emails by arrival. I am not sure what this
means. How does pine figure out when a message arrives at the server ?

The IMAP protocol has two means of accessing messages stored on the IMAP
server. The first is by a monotonically-increasing sequence number, from
1 to the number of messages in the mailbox. The second is by "unique
identifier" (UID), which is a 32-bit number that is required by IMAP to be
strictly-ascending and immutable.

When a message is added, it gets a new (higher) sequence number and UID.
Sequence numbers can get smaller as messages are expunged, but UIDs remain
the same.

These properties have the effect that a message with a lower number,
whether sequence or UID, is always older "by arrival" than one with a
higher number.

[rouble]

So do you know which method Pine uses -- sequence number or UID ? I am
thinking it uses the sequence number.

The reason I am intererested in this is because if I so much as view an
email in Outlook 2003, that message becomes my newest message by
"arrival" in Pine. The same thing happens if a filter (aka rule) is
applied on any email in Outlook 2003. This is very annoying.

From your explanation, it seems like Outlook 2003 is messing with the
sequence number of this message - even though the message does not
change folders. Is this legal ?

This is the main reason why I am trying to move away from the "arrival"
view in Pine.

Cheers
rouble

Note that this "arrival" is NOT when the message was received by the
server, nor is it when the message was composed. Arrival is when the
message was deposited in that particular mailbox. So, if you copy a
message from INBOX to a secondary mailbox on the server, that copy is the
most-recently arrived message regardless of its age in INBOX.

.

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