[Dovecot] Maildir, imap and newness of messages

[Anand Buddhdev]

I'm using the standard Dovecot 0.99.14 on Fedora Core 4, with a
Maildir++ mailbox.  I've noticed what I think is an oddity in the way
dovecot handles messages:

According to the Maildir specification, a message in Maildir/new is a
truly new message, which has not yet been touched by any reader. From
an IMAP viewpoint, such a message should have the flag RECENT.
However, if a message exists in Maildir/cur, then it means that the
message is no longer new (because some other reader has opened the
Maildir, and moved the message from new to cur). From an IMAP
viewpoint, such a message should NOT have the RECENT flag.

However, dovecot seems to get this wrong. For example, if I have a
message in Maildir/new, and I use mutt (a console-based maildir-aware
mail client) to open the Maildir, then mutt moves the messages from
Maildir/new to Maildir/cur (note here that I haven't actually read the
message yet, just opened the Maildir with mutt). I expect that when I
now open this Maildir with dovecot imap, and do a "select inbox", it
should report "1 EXISTS" and "0 RECENT". However, dovecot reports this
as "1 EXISTS" and "1 RECENT".

In my opinion, this is a bug in Dovecot. Would any of the developers
like to comment?

Anand