Re: Expire and Delete again

[dsg@mitre.org (David S. Goldberg)]

> I agree. However, as long as there is no support to have a special
> mark for \Delete'd messages in the Gnus/nnimap, I don't consider
> nnimap really compliant to imap.  I don't want to make imap fit the
> needs of Gnus, Gnus must fit the needs of imap.  imap is a standard,
> Gnus is not.  Gnus/nnimap way of ignoring the \Delete flag results
> in trouble in different circumstances.  [1]

As we discussed off list (repeated for the benefit of others who may
be interested) I think you can get the E mark to do what you want by
modifying nnimap-mark-to-flag-alist and
nnimap-mark-to-predicate-alist.  However I don't think that
overloading Gnus expiry this way is correct for the general case.
Gnus is not an internet standard, but its expiry semantics are, with
respect to the various backends.  Overloading expiry as you're
suggesting breaks it, certainly for me at least, and I suspect others
too.  For example I have to use Netscape to read IMAP mail fairly
often because some of the people I correspond with use S/MIME
encryption (some day I'll figure out how to deal with that stuff using
openSSL, but until then...).  If I expunge from Netscape, the only
messages that I want to go away are those that have outlived their
expiry time as defined by Gnus.  I don't see that as asking IMAP to
fit Gnus, I see it as Gnus taking advantage of an IMAP feature to
prevent other IMAP clients from breaking a critical (IMHO) Gnus
feature.

That said, I agree that there is a problem as you describe it.  It
seems to me that the ideal solution would be for nnimap to recognize
messages marked with \Delete as it downloads the headers and cause the
summary generation to mark the article with something other than O.  I
don't know how hard it would be to do that or if that would require
defining a new mark.
-- 
Dave Goldberg
Post: The Mitre Corporation\MS B325\202 Burlington Rd.\Bedford, MA 01730
Phone: 781-271-3887
Email: dsg@mitre.org