Tasker Plugin and email read/unread status

[Scott_Miller]

I noticed a change in behavior today, that I think has been happening for a while. I don't know if this is caused by AquaMail or by some other program, but due to the circumstances surrounding my observation, it seems likely that AquaMail is the source.

First, some background. I ue two devices. A tablet and a phone. Tasker is installed on both. I am part of an on call rotation. I receive an email which notifies me whether I am going on call or going off call. When the email is received by AquaMail, it triggers Tasker to either enable or disable several other profiles that I use to alert me when an on call event occurs.

For some time, this event has not been triggering reliably on both devices. Today, I think I stumbled on why. My tablet got the email first, and correctly changed the state of the other profiles. The phone never reacted. When I checked the email, on the phone, it was already marked as having been read. The problem is that I did not read the email. The account being used is an imap account, so naturally another app or program on any device could have changed the state of the email. But I didn't open the email anywhere. The only thing that "opened" the email, as far as I know, was the AquaMail plugin on the tablet.

So, my question then, does the AquaMail plugin mark the email as having been read if it reacts to receiving it? I hope it does not. It certainly should not do so unless I want it to do so, and I was not able to find an option within the plugin for that purpose. Perhaps I overlooked it.

I receive all of my on call alerts via email, and they also trigger actions in Tasker using the AquaMail plugin. If this behavior is actually caused by AquaMail, that makes my entire setup unreliable. I could switch to using a pop account, which shouldn't exhibit the same problem, but I don't want to do that, as pop does not support push email. Ideally, AquaMail plugin should react to the new email on every device I have it setup on, and not change the state of the email.

I will eventually setup a test profile on both devices to try and replicate this condition, but I haven't had sufficient time to do that yet. I am hoping that this may turn out to be a bug that can be fixed.

Scott M.

Sent from my SM-T820 using Tapatalk

[Scott_Miller]

I noticed a change in behavior today, that I think has been happening for a while. I don't know if this is caused by AquaMail or by some other program, but due to the circumstances surrounding my observation, it seems likely that AquaMail is the source.

First, some background. I ue two devices. A tablet and a phone. Tasker is installed on both. I am part of an on call rotation. I receive an email which notifies me whether I am going on call or going off call. When the email is received by AquaMail, it triggers Tasker to either enable or disable several other profiles that I use to alert me when an on call event occurs.

For some time, this event has not been triggering reliably on both devices. Today, I think I stumbled on why. My tablet got the email first, and correctly changed the state of the other profiles. The phone never reacted. When I checked the email, on the phone, it was already marked as having been read. The problem is that I did not read the email. The account being used is an imap account, so naturally another app or program on any device could have changed the state of the email. But I didn't open the email anywhere. The only thing that "opened" the email, as far as I know, was the AquaMail plugin on the tablet.

So, my question then, does the AquaMail plugin mark the email as having been read if it reacts to receiving it? I hope it does not. It certainly should not do so unless I want it to do so, and I was not able to find an option within the plugin for that purpose. Perhaps I overlooked it.

I receive all of my on call alerts via email, and they also trigger actions in Tasker using the AquaMail plugin. If this behavior is actually caused by AquaMail, that makes my entire setup unreliable. I could switch to using a pop account, which shouldn't exhibit the same problem, but I don't want to do that, as pop does not support push email. Ideally, AquaMail plugin should react to the new email on every device I have it setup on, and not change the state of the email.

I will eventually setup a test profile on both devices to try and replicate this condition, but I haven't had sufficient time to do that yet. I am hoping that this may turn out to be a bug that can be fixed.

Scott M.

Sent from my SM-T820 using Tapatalk

I'm probably wrong with my observations presented, but wanted to bring it up. This morning, things worked correctly. I still can't explain how the message was marked as read, even though I never looked at it. I will keep watching, and if I see anything definitive, I will certainly update this thread.

Sent from my SM-T820 using Tapatalk

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Re: So, my question then, does the AquaMail plugin mark the email as having been read if it reacts to receiving it? I hope it does not.

It doesn't. There is no code in the plugin to do that.

As for why it happened - are you perhaps mixing IMAP and POP3 across your email apps (not just Aqua)?

[Scott_Miller]

As for why it happened - are you perhaps mixing IMAP and POP3 across your email apps (not just Aqua)?

I do access the same account with a POP client. Are you suggesting that the POP client is marking it read when it downloads? I haven't noticed that, but I'll pay more attention.


Sent from my SM-T820 using Tapatalk

[mikeone]

As for why it happened - are you perhaps mixing IMAP and POP3 across your email apps (not just Aqua)?

I do access the same account with a POP client. Are you suggesting that the POP client is marking it read when it downloads? I haven't noticed that, but I'll pay more attention.


Sent from my SM-T820 using Tapatalk

Yes, some mail server mark messages as read once they’ve been downloaded by a mail application, some do not.

Kostya recently added a new entry in the app's FAQ-page:
[search for: marked as read ]

http://www.aqua-mail.com/?page_id=227

[Scott_Miller]

As for why it happened - are you perhaps mixing IMAP and POP3 across your email apps (not just Aqua)?

I do access the same account with a POP client. Are you suggesting that the POP client is marking it read when it downloads? I haven't noticed that, but I'll pay more attention.


Sent from my SM-T820 using Tapatalk

Yes, some mail server mark messages as read once they’ve been downloaded by a mail application, some do not.

Kostya recently added a new entry in the app's FAQ-page:
[search for: marked as read ]

http://www.aqua-mail.com/?page_id=227

I was not aware of this. I've been using email for a very long time, and never encountered this situation, or at least, I never noticed it. I just checked a different account, and it did not mark the message as read. I will try the one that is giving me problems tomorrow, to confirm. Depending on that result, I will reach out to the provider to see if can turn it off.


Kostya, that brings me to my original problem, then. If a message is marked as read, what happens when AquaMail sees it for the first time, in particular with the Tasker plugin? Does it still get picked up by the plugin so Tasker can react to it? I'm guessing it does not, based upon what I have been experiencing.

If the pop3 situation turns out to be the source of the problem, and if I can't get the provider to turn it off, I will change how I use the pop client. Mainly, I will disable the automatic check for new mail for this account. I would eliminate the pop3 altogether, and just use imap, but I want the email to be saved local in an Outlook PST file. I'm only supposed to keep 14 days online. It would  be much more convenient, for me at least, if the plugin would trigger regardless of the read state.

Scott M

Sent from my SM-T820 using Tapatalk

[StR]

Re: imap and local copy of messages.
I am not sure about outlook, but with Thunderbird, you can configure it to save all messages locally.

[Scott_Miller]

I have confirmed with the provider that they do indeed mark messages as read when picked up by a POP3 client. And it is not possible to change the behavior.

My personal account dies not behave this way, so it is not consistent across all POP3 servers.

:-(

Sent from my SM-T820 using Tapatalk

[StR]

This behavior is very frequent. Gmail does the same, unless you use a special workaround.

[mikeone]

I have confirmed with the provider that they do indeed mark messages as read when picked up by a POP3 client. And it is not possible to change the behavior.

My personal account dies not behave this way, so it is not consistent across all POP3 servers.

:-(

Sent from my SM-T820 using Tapatalk

https://www.aqua-mail.com/forum/index.php?topic=6059.msg36915#msg36915

Yes, some mail server mark messages as read once they’ve been downloaded by a mail application, some do not.