POP3 emails reported as new mail even when read

[Donald Broatch]

I have Mail-Notification set up with three web-based POP3 email accounts (Hotmail and two ISP accounts) and Gmail.

If I read an email in Gmail, Mail-Notification correctly no longer reports it as new.

With the POP3 accounts, if I read the email on the web site, Mail-Notification continues to report it as new. Labelling the email as read on the web site doesn't make any difference.

This bug also applies to cGmail, another email notification program.

I'm using Ubuntu 9.10.

[Donald Broatch (donaldbroatch)]

I found this in the help file.

When monitoring a POP3 mailbox, Mail Notification reports all messages as new.

         This is caused by limitations in the POP3 protocol. You
         should configure your mail reader so that it deletes mail
         from the server after downloading it.

In the light of this, is there any way for Mail-Notification not to report POP3 mails as "new", but as "in the mailbox" or "on the server" for example?

In the mail summary, "Mailboxes having new mail" could read "Mailboxes having mail".

This way users won't be confused by the "new" label for email that has been read on the server.

I see here that there is a way to recognise new mail using UIDL's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_Protocol
http://www.example-code.com/vb/read-pop3-unread-email.asp

But large mailboxes present a problem:

"When retrieving new messages, an IMAP client requests the UIDs greater than the highest UID among all previously-retrieved messages, whereas a POP client must fetch the entire UIDL map. For large mailboxes, this can require significant processing."

Is this the reason Mail-Notification does not use UIDL's?