[imp] Unexpected deletion of drafts in DIMP

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Jan Schneider <jan at horde.org>:

> 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.

IIRC, it was my conversations with Timo (dovecot) around the time I  
was planning the new IMAP client library that was illuminating.  The  
idea being certain IMAP flags are not meant to ever be  
viewable/changeable by a user from a UI standpoint.  This is why a  
user can not explicitly set the Forwarded, Answered, and Draft flags  
anymore - these flags are reserved for certain behaviors only.

When you are composing a message, drafts is intended exclusively for  
being able to "save" a message to finish it later.  Once finished, it  
is no longer needed.  It is not designed to be used as a templating  
system.  We now have stationery for this (see below).

I realize that in the past using Drafts may have been the only way to  
do this kind of templating (depending on the version of IMP used, or  
the IMP view used), but that is no longer the case.  I think it is  
entirely appropriate to focus/tighten-up this kind of Drafts usage  
when we have other systems in place that allow a user to perform the  
previous functions.

As an example, the Flagged for Followup is *not* a permanent flag.  It  
is designed to be a one-time-only indication that a message needs to  
be dealt with.  Once the message is replied/forwarded, the flag is  
cleared.  In IMP 4 this flag was used more as a priority indicator,  
but that was simply because of the limitation on creating additional  
keywords.  Since this is now fixed in IMP 5, we can now use the way it  
was intended for.

> Stationery are a good point and we might consider changing to the  
> other camp with stationery being available in both IMP and DIMP now.

Agreed.  Or else, what is the purpose of stationery?

> 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.

This is a UI issue.  This is still a use for stationery - it just  
needs to be easier to create stationery if necessary.  We could also  
add an option (I think Thunderbird has this option) to create a mail  
message from the contents of any existing message.

michael

-- 
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Michael Slusarz [slusarz at horde.org]