remove entry from deliver.db

[Greg A. Woods]

At Fri, 13 Apr 2007 11:40:25 -0400, Derek T. Yarnell wrote:
Subject: Re: remove entry from deliver.db
> 
> On Thu, 2007-04-12 at 13:40 -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > 
> > If the user accidentally deletes a message then restoring it from
> > backups should be no different for a message in the "Junk" folder
> > vs. one in any other folder, no?
> 
> Depends, you need to know more of the circumstances and in this case it
> happened minutes after it was delivered so yeah, backups won't help.

OK, so you want to give messages that have been categorized as JUNK more
careful treatment and make them more recoverable than all other non-junk
messages?  That sounds really backwards.

I.e. if a user deletes a newly delivered non-junk message from their
INBOX then it's _gone_, right?  You couldn't re-deliver it to them
either (because of the duplicate delivery suppression), even if you did
keep a copy in some magic archive queue in the LDA.

If you and/or your users want a more fool-proof message handling system
then use the (new) delayed expunge feature as was suggested by someone
else!  Mucking with delivery agents is the wrong approach and doesn't
solve any problems properly.  You can never really push the problem far
enough back to the source to truly solve it.  MTAs and LDAs and the
protocols they use are already designed for safe and reliable transport
and delivery -- you can only break them by trying to solve problems they
do not have in the first place.  Don't fix what's not broken.


> > Alternately the quarantine system could simply send a separate unique
> > notification message to the user and then only deliver the quarantined
> > message if the user requests it somehow.  I really don't like that idea
> > for many reasons though.
> 
> The message is untouched by the quarantine, so to munge a new message id
> would be the wrong way to approach this IMHO.

That's not what I meant.

The new message would be unique.  I.e. it would not be a copy of the
original message and it would not contain the original message.  It
would only contain enough information about the original to help the
user decide whether or not they want to actually go retrieve the
original from the quarantine system.  Only when the user decides they
want to retrieve the quarantined message would that original message be
finally delivered (once) to their INBOX as if it were a normal ordinary
non-junk message.

For those who really insist on using the idea of a quarantine system
which keeps the original message isolated from the user, that's the
"right" way to do it.

The other "right" way is to do as I suggested and design the system such
that the original message is only ever delivered once (just as all other
ordinary non-junk messages are), but instead of being delivered to the
normal INBOX (or to other incoming folders via Sieve rules or folder
suffix rules, etc.), it could be delivered to a "Quarantined" folder
where the user could examine it directly in the normal ways with no
further interaction with the local delivery agents necessary.

No matter how you do it though, any system which automatically
classifies e-mail in such a way that the user is invited to ignore
messages which are deemed to be unworthy eventually leads to lost mail
-- that's just human nature at work.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

H:+1 416 218-0098 W:+1 416 489-5852 x122 VE3TCP RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
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