[imp] hide messages marked for deletion or purge deleted messages

[Joseph Brennan]

Chris Lafty <clafty at stlawu.edu> wrote:

> A lot of our clients use Thunderbird (IMAP) and of course Thunderbird
> marks messages for deletion and hides them.  When the client logs onto
> imp/dimp, they see all of their deleted messages.  Is there a way we can
> purge the mailbox if a user deletes a message that was marked for
> deletion?  We'd still like regular messages moved to the trash upon
> deletion, but not marked for deletion.  Obviously, we don't want this to
> apply to messages already marked for deletion.


Wow, I got lost in those sentences.

The problem is the inconsistent configurations on Thunderbird and IMP.
Thunderbird simply marks messages deleted.  IMP copies them to Trash,
marks them deleted, and (at some point) expunges the mailbox.

When you have IMP configured to save to Trash, what do you think it
should do when it opens inbox and finds messages marked deleted?  That
probably means those messages were not saved to Trash.  Should it copy
them to Trash?  Or should you have to use IMP's "delete" command to
get them copied to Trash?  Either way the next expunge will remove
them.  I don't know if there's a clean answer to this.

You could have both Tbird and IMP use Trash, or both not.


Joseph Brennan
Columbia University Information Technology