Cyrus and Mozilla (and other multi-threaded clients)

[Mike Brodbelt]

Hi,

(I've sent this before, but it never seemed to show up, so apologies if
anyone has recieved it twice)

I remember having seen this discussed before, but I can't find any
resolution, so I'm asking about it again in the hope that someone can
educate me about exactly what goes on...

AFAIK, when you use multi-threaded email clients (like Mozilla Mail)
with Cyrus, flag state can sometimes become "unstable". This is most
obvious when a user reads a new message. The message arrives in an
unread state, the user reads it, thus setting \Seen, and some time
later, another operation on the mailbox by a different thread re-stores
the message with the flag unset, so the message appears to spontaneously
revert to an unread state.

This issue also appears to cause problems with the junk-mail controls in
Mozilla, which use a Bayesian technique to identify likely spam in
incoming mail, and (usually) move it to a specified folder. Messages
that get moved to my junk-mail folder often get duplicated, sometimes
several times. I'm guessing this is because the move operation causes
one thread to set \Deleted, but parallel threads don't always see this,
and as such the message can be moved multiple times, before the deleted
status "takes".

Is there a work around for these problems? Is it anything Cyrus can fix,
or is it inherent in the design of the client? I'd appreciate anyone who
can improve my understanding of exactly what goes on, and tell me if
theres anything I can do about it. I can live with it if not, but a
workaround/fix would be nice.

TIA,

Mike.

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