Re: delete no longer working

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

Martin Fouts <fouts@null.net> writes:

> When I switched from 0.3.20 to 0.3.27 (Gnus 5.6.34, Emacs 19.34, Free
> BSD Imap server) the ability to use the Gnus "Delete" function seems
> to have quit working.  I can still invoke delete in the summary buffer
> of an imap group by typing B-DEL but the articles don't seem to be
> deleted on the other side.

Yup. For now we only set the \Deleted flag on the article.

Previous we also did CLOSE (which EXPUNGEs articles) when quiting a
mailbox, perhaps we should go back to this behaviour.

Tech talk:

As my understanding of the IMAP protocol we can't actually delete one
given article in any safe way. We can use UID EXPUNGE from the UIDPLUS
extension, but this isn't standard.

The problem with EXPUNGE is that you can't be sure of what you
expunge, if the \Deleted flag should have any user-visible semantics
at all you could have articles marked \Deleted but keep them in the
mailbox. Then EXPUNGE can't be used, hence we cannot delete articles
at all.

One suggestion I read somewhere was to unmark all flags, mark the
article you wish to delete and then do EXPUNGE. This is single-client
oriented and I don't like it.

What am I supposed to do?  Either we can let the user have the option
of deleting a given article (Yiha!), or we can have the \Deleted flag
mean anything at all to the user, IMO we cannot have both.

Netscape and Pine seem to have choosen not to let the user delete a
given article. I'm not sure I like this.

Perhaps I haven't groked what the \Deleted flag is supposed to be used
for, or something...

/s