[imp] Virtual INBOX and Trash weirdness

[Darragh Bailey]

Quoting Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at mail.curecanti.org>:

> It's a limit of imap_status() - it only returns the unseen deleted
> messages without regard to whether they are flagged deleted or not.
> THe only way around this is to list the flags of every message in every
> mailbox to get an accurate count - a bad solution.
>
> Maybe a better solution is, if using Virtual Trash, then when the
> messages are deleted they are marked as seen.
>
> michael


Spotted this sometime ago on a website I help maintain and keep meaning to look
at adding some code to solve it. One of the suggestions that I came up with was
to use a combination of 2 functions and the session

use function
object imap_status ( resource imap_stream, string mailbox, int options)

to retreive the unread messages, but will also return unread deleted messages.

Store this number in the session as the total unread messages.

use function
array imap_search ( resource imap_stream, string criteria [, int options [,
string charset]])
In which you can specify "UNREAD UNDELETED"

store the size of the array as the unread messages.

Then you need only call the imap_search function in the future if the total
unread messages stored in the session and the number returned by imap_status
differ.


No idea though just how expensive it is to call imap_search, nor in general how
often it would get called.

--
Darragh

"Nothing's foolproof to a sufficently talented fool"