Some Email Arrives Already 'Read'

Maintenance
#1

I’m glad I’ve [hopefully] got past the meat and potatoes of getting my MIAB setup and running and my humongous archives transferred from Google and can now turn my attention to more trivial matters. Here’s an odd one:

When I receive email on my MIAB and view it on Roundcube, quite often the email arrives ‘already read’ [in that the wee dot beside the email is grey].

My first thought was that the emails were being opened elsewhere and the status changed and updated over IMAP. However when I check in Thunderbird on my laptop or my email app on my phone, the emails are showing up there as unread.

Its not a huge problem as I’ll rarely, if ever, be using the web interface. I’ve just been availing of it at the minute, as my Gmail archive was over 20000 messages and Thunderbird has been indexing them for 3 days now and, consequently, running like a slug on mogadon. Bit I’m curious as to why it might be happening?

#2

…and, while I’m glitch-hunting, here’s another odd one:

Often, when I delete an email in Thunderdird or on my phone, it appears as a kind of ghost marked with a ‘No Entry’ sign in Roundcube but still in my Inbox. So, why is it not moving to the Deleted Items on Roundcube, when I’ve deleted it in my desktop client? That should sync over IMAP.

SS 2022-05-07 at 11.35.46

#3

I’m really curious if this behavior stops once your indexing stops. Did you check load on the box? Have you restarted the box since you’ve moved in? Almost sounds like a resource issue/memory leak??

Can you try a quick reboot and see what becomes of that?

#4

Well, Thunderbird has just finished indexing. So I’ll see if it still happens from now on. Or did you mean that MIAB will also be indexing the imported mail behind the scenes?

#5

Thunderbird, I don’t believe the box itself indexes anything. Also likely why search for email is not as good as gmail :frowning:

Maybe there is a roundcube plugin for that?

#6

On the server there isn’t any actual indexing in the sense of a search engine index. This isn’t a feature that comes with something like a plugin, it’s more like an entire backend server. Usually people use Solr for mail search application, but getting Solr on the same server likely requires a server with minimum 2GB memory, even for a small personal server, but YMMV.

I opt for deep searching using Thunderbird. It seems to have its own local index even for IMAP and most of my searches are returned nearly instantly across all folders and accounts.

#7

Thanks for the suggestion. Not a huge Java fan. I typically use my iPhone search to find mail that roundcube wont fine and it works really well. Wish roundcube had a more powerful search built in. Seems that its probably long overdue for something of today’s standards.

I guess it is what it is…

#8

If this hasn’t been answered yet . . .

Roundcube defaults to simply marking mail as deleted in the inbox. In [Settings/Preferences/Server Settings] there is an option to “Flag the message for deletion instead of delete”. Turn that off.

I think this kind of dates back to command-line email preferences.