Re: expiry =? expunge

[Simon Josefsson <jas@pdc.kth.se>]

Kim-Minh Kaplan <kmkaplan@vocatex.fr> writes:

> > Think of expire marks as a delayed delete mark (which is exactly
> > the semantics of \Deleted in IMAP).
> 
> No, they do not mean the same thing: \Delete means this article will
> be nuked on the next EXPUNGE (I don't think you can say EXPUNGE
> articles that are more than N days old).  Gnus' expire mark means this
> article will be nuked when certain other conditions are fulfilled
> (usually it is means the article is old enough).

Yup, the expire function in nnimap would have to be changed so it only
EXPUNGEs article that should be EXPIREd. Ie

remove \Deleted marks on articles not matching the conditions
EXPUNGE
restore \Deleted marks

> This is a very nice feature that lets you have loads of articles
> marked as expirable but they will not be nuked at the same time.  The
> lack of this feature is one of the reasons Netscape sucks when it
> comes to mail handling.

Yup. I'm not replacing (the flexible) expiring with (the inflexible)
expunging, I'm just replacing the client-specific `gnus-expire' flag
with \Deleted.

> > I think this is a good and necessery step since it makes nnimap a
> > better IMAP citizen. What do you think?
> 
> I think the current way of handling article removal is good.  Users
> have access to the \Delete attribute through
> `gnus-summary-delete-article' and to the EXPUNGE command through
> `gnus-group-nnimap-expunge'.
> 
> I love article expiry.  Please don't make it go away !

No no, at the user level everything will work as before.

The change is to make it smoother to use nnimap/gnus together with
other IMAP clients. If you only used nnimap/gnus you couldn't tell the
difference (it would be faster and work with more servers though):

There are three problems right now:

1) there is no way to show \Deleted articles in gnus
2) nnimap does a implicit EXPUNGE all the time
3) client-specific flag aren't implemented everywhere

The first two things make it irritating to use other IMAP clients
together with nnimap/gnus. "Irratating" means they'll probably lose
articles they wanted to keep (since they don't see \Deleted articles
in nnimap/gnus and nnimap does a implicit EXPUNGE).

Putting a expire mark on a article doesn't physically remove the
article but it is a form of deletion. The \Deleted mark works about
the same way, only the inflexible manual "compress mailbox" button in
netscape is replaced by a automatic delayed delete operation in Gnus.

One problem is that users might lose mail they known would stick
around for a day or two more if they pressed the manual "compress
mailbox" in netscape, but it is a destructive operation so a user
shouldn't press it for fun. Also, articles marked with E aren't meant
to be kept so the user wouldn't lose important mail.

Do you still think it's a bad idea?  I'm not completely convinced
about it, but I'm leaning towards it...