[Dovecot] Maildir format use question

[Rick Romero]

Hey all,

I've got a couple servers using Maildir format.  As I understand it from
a simple perspective, 'new' contains newly delivered messages, and 'cur'
contains messages that have been 'handled'.

I like to keep things simple for users, so rather than have 'Spam',
'Junk' 'ToLearn' and other possibly confusing folders, what I thought I
would do is scan their .Spam/cur folder for mail that was older than an
hour (based on file atime(?) stamp) and feed that through SpamAssassin.
The idea being that anything in 'cur' would:
1. have been moved there by the user.
2. be recently read, and I think if it were innocent, would be handled
within an hour
3. Not contain newly delivered, unread mail.

This is actually what I see when I view my Spam folder through
Evolution.   If I use a PHP webclient - either Horde or Roundcube (I've
captured the debugs if you'd like them), then a simple view of the Spam
folder causes the files to be moved from new/ to cur/.  They are updated
with the :2, - but since nothing was actually done, no flags are added.

So I'm left with a quandry.  I guess the simple question is, Should mail
in cur, EVER not have a flag?  I suppose if it were marked as UNSEEN
after being SEEN, that's possible.  So I just answered myself there :)

Is it possible to have Dovecot NOT move a file from new/ to cur/ until a
flag has been assigned to the mail?  Just from a, possible, performance
standpoint - it seems when accessing an INBOX from a PHP webmail system
with MANY new mails, there is an unnecessary(?) mass move of these files
to another folder.

Thoughts?

Rick