On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 10:02:30 -0600, Charles McNulty charles@charlesmcnulty.com wrote:
I'd have to do some testing to find out exactly what clients create what, but in my IMAP I have Trash, INBOX.TRASH and neomail-trash. I think it's fairly safe to guess where the neomail-trash one came from. Just doing a bit of googling it looks like maybe squirrelmail or IMP created the inbox.trash folder. Anyone out there wanna try deleting their Trash folder to see if Thunderbird recreates it? I'd be willing to bet that it does. I'd try it but I'm not sure how to go about renaming existing IMAP folders.
Indeed, I'm sure some do this. However, I've never been a fan of forcing changes or creating items without user specification. I personally do not use tools / programs that do this without me telling it to.
Example: iTunes. You can tell it to automatically update which will essentially wipe out everything on your iPod if a few things don't match up such as the check on the DB file. If you have it set to automatically update, it will kill everything it see's and remake the DB file and readd the files from your local library. If iTunes did this without giving me the option to turn that feature off, I would never use iTunes and instead use one of the many Linux clients (such as GtkPod) for creating my playlists. However, iTunes does in fact offer a feature to turn this off and allow you to manually update.
Just not a big fan of the program thinking it knows better than the user.
In any case, I think it's fair to say that at least some major webmail IMAP clients create folders without user input. I do actually agree with you in principle though. What about if we:
I knew you'd see it my way. ;)
- modify the folder subscription page to allow people to designate the
"special folders" (Trash, Drafts, Sent, Inbox)
- upon login, if any of those folders is missing, direct them to the
folder subscription screen along with a message directing them to select the folder that is missing (or create a new one)
This is a much more programming intensive solution, but it's the best one I can come up with.
I've personally always been simply a fan of simply deleting the item they wanted to delete, but not expunging. Then, on the mailbox viewing, put a line through the message if the "Deleted" flag is set in the IMAP headers. I know Microsoft's Outlook Express does this, as well as Thunderbird. This lets the user know "Hey, you deleted this. But the server has yet to Expunge."
That's a much quicker solution and seems to be a standard across mail client and doesn't by any means force the user to do what he/she doesn't want to do (i.e. create folders, expunge deleted mail, etc...). It is then up to the user if they want expunge that message.
On the other hand, if they have a trash folder, move it over there. This is as simple as (Pseudo code):
if (empty($trash_folder)) { $imap->delete($msg); } else { $imap->moveToFolder($msg, $trash_folder); }
On the viewbox page, something as simple as:
if ($imap->header[$msg]['Deleted']) { echo "<strike>"; } // Print rest of line here if ($imap->header[$msg]['Deleted']) { echo "</strike>"; }
I guess from there on it would be nice to have an Expunge feature... Especially for the Trash folder. I'm not on the latest CVS branch right now, but I don't think there is one yet.
Dean
-Charles
Dean Jones wrote:
I'm just not sure I like that solution unless you're talking about
making local folders. I don't like anything forcing creation of any files or folder on the IMAP server. If roundcube were to create a local trash folder, fine... But forcing the creation of folder on the IMAP server is, in my opinion, incorrect and a bad design practice. Every IMAP client I have used creates local Trash folders and uses those if one does not exist on the IMAP server or you have not specified your IMAP trash folder as the folder to use. I have never had one secretly create an IMAP folder and just assume that's what I wanted.
On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 09:21:07 -0600, Charles McNulty
charles@charlesmcnulty.com wrote:
The other reasonable option, and the one that I believe most IMAP clients follow is at initial launch create the folders if they do not exist. This is the solution I would endorse.
-Charles
Dean Jones wrote:
Instead of creating a folder that possibly some people might not want,
why not just simply check if there is a Trash folder and if there
isn't,
simply delete the message and expunge? If there is a trash folder,
move
it to Trash.
If this sounds better, I can write a quick patch for it.
On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:17:24 -0700, Jacob Brunson webguy@byu.edu
wrote:
I've had a couple of users complain about not being able to delete messages. The cause turns out to be that they don't have a Trash folder.
The attached diff/patch avoids this by creating the Trash folder if
it
doesn't exist before moving a message into it.
The only problem is that even though the Trash folder is created, it doesn't show up in the folders list until the whole folders list is
refreshed.
-- Jacob Brunson Department of Chemistry, BYU