Updating a mailbox to shared-seen-mode?

[Robert Linden]

Hello!

I'm a bit confused about the shared seen-flag. My situation is like
this:

- I have an old mailbox with messages.
- All messages have already been seen by the owner.
- Now I grant other, new users read-access (r) to the mailbox.
- For these users, all messages appear as unseen.

Up to this point everything is perfectly normal :-) Now I would like to
switch the mailbox to a shared seen flag. I tried it like this:

. setannotation "user/r.linden at tarent.de" "/vendor/cmu/cyrus-imapd/sharedseen" ("value.shared" "true")
. OK Completed

(First question: is that equivalent to "mboxcfg user/r.linden at tarent.de sharedseen true"
in cyradmin? I did that too and it gave no response/error. And the "info" command tells
me that at least one of the two ways was successful: "sharedseen: true")

My expectation was, that then all users would see the same seen-flag
that the mailbox owner sees, i.e. all messages would be "seen" for everyone,
because they have all been seen by the owner.

But instead, the non-owner-users still see the messages as unseen.
Even new messages, received and read (by the owner), after the
sharedseen has supposedly been activated, appear as seen only to the owner,
and unseen to everybody else. The sessions, which have read the messages,
have already been logged out again, so it should not be a matter of the 
seen-state not having been flushed (I have flushseenstate at the default 0).

My expectaion is based on how I understood Bron's explanation here:
http://www.mentby.com/Group/info-cyrus/migration-and-seen-flag.html

But maybe that only applies to 2.4.?
http://www.mentby.com/Group/info-cyrus/shared-seen-flags-on-shared-folders.html

I have version 2.3.14. The changelog says that shared seen flag ist possible
since 2.3.9 (and obviously my version does support it, just not the way I
expected):
http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/docs/cyrus-imapd/2.4.0/changes.php

And how does all that relate to the "Owner Seen", which is listed as a
"Future Idea" here?
http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Future_Ideas
Is that how 2.4. works? But is it only a question of performance, or a
visible change in behaviour?

Can someone please tell me what I am missing or doing wrong? I would like
everybody to see the same seen flag as the owner, while only the owner should
be able to _set_ the seen flag (for that I guess I only need to _not_ grant
the s-right to anybody else?).

Thanks for reading this long mail and thanks a lot in advance for any hints,
rob

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