Comment 6 for bug 737206

FWIW, I never saw this (the marking as "read" as a bug but as a feature. It does what it says on the tin - the mail is donwloaded/"read". It tells me when I am absent from home that the downloader runs just fine. There are sure other ways of learning of downloader failure, but this is kind of an obvious one, requiring no additional infrastructure.

It is obvious to anyone who uses it - i.e. at the very latest from the first run, so the need to document it is probably neither here nor there. The bug would then anyway only be lack of documentation rather than buggy behaviour. Your patch introduces different behaviour which in its own right could be considered buggy/undesirable. Both behaviours appear perfectly valid, technically, and the desirability of one over the other is debatable.

Given that some want something different, the appropriate request is still a feature request - and again, not a feature request to change previous behaviour but the ability by users to change behaviour as per their own wishes, in short a configuration option.

This was raised on the mailing list and has been declined as the developer has no desire to create new features he does not need. Which is his prerogative.

This leaves you with the option to fork.