Outlook does not delete but displays deleted messages asstrike-trough

[Warren Turkal]

On Monday 22 May 2006 10:45, you wrote:
> I'm not sure I understand why you think marking deleted messages is  
> so bad. Have you never accidentally deleted the wrong message? Only  
> to have it totally disappear, so you're not SURE what you deleted?  
> I'd much rather have closer control over what my mail program is  
> doing...

My email clients put deleted messages into a trash bin. I can go there to 
retrieve messages. The fact of the matter is that most of the time someone 
deletes a message, they mean to do it. I believe that having an undo in case 
someone deletes the message accidentally is important. I just think the way 
that feature is implemented in Outlook for IMAP cripples the common use case 
where someone means to delete a message.

Outlook does a very sane thing with POP mail. It moves the message to the 
trash folder. It does something similar when using an Exchange server. The 
only time that it exhibits the weird behavior is when interacting with an 
IMAP server.

Outlook has many other problems also. Think about this one. If you only have 
an IMAP email account, you would probably want to show the inbox for that 
IMAP account by default. The only way to change the default folder for 
Outlook is to start editing registry keys. Why would something like that not 
be configurable within the program?

I personally think that Outlook does what it can to make its users depend on 
Exchange since IMAP provides nearly all of the mail related benefits of using 
Exchange from the client perspective. When using Exchange, for instance, your 
mail magically pops up in the main inbox. It would be nice to be able to use 
IMAP in a mode like that. Maybe one should be able to tell Outlook that the 
IMAP is the only account and have it treated as such.

Of course, to be fair, all mail clients have their issues. For one example, 
Mail.app, the Mac OS X client, removes all messages in your inbox associated 
with a particular POP account when you delete the account. This doesn't make 
sense since the message are downloaded and more than likely erased from the 
server.

wt
-- 
Warren Turkal, Research Associate III/Systems Administrator
Colorado State University, Dept. of Atmospheric Science