[imp] Unexpected deletion of drafts in DIMP

[Jan Schneider]

Zitat von Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at horde.org>:

> Quoting Jochen Roderburg <Roderburg at Uni-Koeln.DE>:
>
>> Another issue upon which I stumbled again when I made my tests for  
>> the cache problem:
>>
>> The IMP behaviour regarding "drafts" that I know from IMP3 is:
>> I can click on a draft in the drafts folder, get it in a compose  
>> screen, can continue working on it and send it. After this the  
>> draft is still stored in the folder for future use.
>>
>> In the traditional Interface of IMP4 this works the same, but in  
>> DIMP the stored draft is unconditionally deleted after sending. No  
>> question, no warning, nothing, it is just gone.
>>
>> Bug or new future, configuration or what?
>>
>> This is certainly not the expected and wanted behaviour!!
>
> Yes it is.  A draft is, by definition (RFC 3501 [2.3.2]), a "[m]essage
> [that] has not completed composition."  Thus, the natural extension is
> that once the message HAS completed composition, it is no longer
> needed.  This is no different than any other message you compose - once
> you hit send, you have no access to the content of that message anymore.
>
> If that message wasn't deleted, eventually your Drafts folder would
> contain hundreds of old drafts.  That is obviously not very useful.
>
> If you want to keep a message around to use as a template, you  
> should be using stationery.

Funny, I just discussed about exactly that with some guy in the K-9  
channel. There always have been two different point of views on draft  
messages in mail client development. One camp considers a draft a  
temporary message state that is obsolete once the message has been  
sent. The other sees drafts as message templates. And there is also  
some differentiation depending on how the draft was created.
IMP has always been in the latter camp, and we shouldn't silently  
change this. I always had the impression that DIMP distinguishes  
between auto-saved drafts that are going to be deleted and manually  
saved draft that should stick. That would have been the ideal approach  
anyway.
Stationery are a good point and we might consider changing to the  
other camp with stationery being available in both IMP and DIMP now.  
OTOH there is still the use case where I want to write some  
mail-merge-like message, sending the same message a few times to  
different recipients with slightly different content, like different  
titles. I really don't want to go to the preferences and create  
stationery just for that.

Jan.

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