[imp] IMP with dynamic is surprising users with how far delete goes

[Simon Brereton]

On 8 November 2011 08:08, francis picabia <fpicabia at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 1:45 AM, Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at horde.org> wrote:
>> Quoting francis picabia <fpicabia at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> At our site, we've had dynamic mail with IMP active for roughly 3 weeks.
>>>
>>> Today we have our second user to restore from backup after a user
>>> "accidentally" deletes all of their email.  I had difficulty
>>> understanding this until the second occurrence.
>>>
>>> In traditional mode, the email is displayed in pages. This is like
>>> many online email services at hotmail, google mail, etc.
>>>
>>> Users are accustomed to selecting the upper check box to select
>>> everything on the page (all viewable on the screen).  They select
>>> delete, thinking it is only the messages they see at the time.  In
>>> reality, it selected everything in their mailbox. They purged,
>>> thinking it was only the messages in front of their eyeballs being
>>> purged.  Of course, it deleted and purged everything in their mailbox.
>>
>> You're kidding me, right?  The dynamic view is exactly how every other UI
>> handles a select all.  The traditional view is hamstrung by PHP/page
>> architecture and it is the UI that is wrong.
>>
>> Regardless, the answer is easy.  Use a trash mailbox.
>>
>
> It is no joke, there really are two users who deleted all their email.
>  I'd assume they were more accustomed to the paged view in
> traditional, also used in free webmail interfaces.  It is rather
> alarming if you don't think this is a serious issue.

It's more alarming that a) your users can confuse the functionality of
a SW GUI with a pagination GUI and b) that you do nothing to educate
them.  When you migrated to H4, did you sell it to your
clients/customers/userbase as being new, exciting and advanced and
much more like a SW interface?  (Tip;  use the word cloud interface
and they'll lap it up)...


> We had used a trash in the past with cyrus and imp 3, and people would
> fill up their quota with deleted mail they didn't know was there.

Then that's an imap administration issue.

> How do I enable the trash?  Is this the same as Virtual Trash? I found
> a checkbox to "Automatically create special mailboxes" in a UI part of
> config and turned this on.  Deleted messages are not copied into my
> trash.
>
> Also, does it have a way to automatically delete from trash after XX
> number of days?


Have you looked at the Deleting and Moving Messages preference in IMP?
 Have you considered running an SQL  query to set that for all users?


Simon