Automatically moving marked mails?

[Greg A. Woods]

At Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:35:15 +0200, Garry <garry at glendown.de> wrote:
Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
> 
> The point is not when decent MUAs are used, like Thunderbird, but rather
> crap like Outlook ... which is unable to do a decent, logical handling
> of deleted mails... ;)

Decent MUAs are _always_ "available", at least to some extent.

People who won't choose to use decent software when it is available and
instead insist upon using broken crapware _must_ learn that they are on
their own -- they are unsupported, they get no sympathy.

In this case though I'm not sure what the problem is (at least based
upon this one feature -- groupware might be broken in other ways).


> Problem is, $customer is using a groupware which - when using IMAP -
> will display deleted or moved mails as struck-through mails, which will
> no doubt confuse certain users ... therefore, it would be nice if Cyrus
> could be convinced to have a special delted-mails handling ... as it is
> close to impossible to change Outlook's handling ...

Actually that's the desired way for an IMAP client to work!  (and the
majority of the good ones I'm aware of do work that way where possible,
though sadly not two of the ones I'm using at the moment)

What could possibly be confusing about a summary index entry showing a
message using a struck-through font face?  It should be self-evident to
anyone with a gram of experience using any modern decent graphical
computer user interface that the message has been marked as deleted.
(some more limited GUIs could use a particular colour or grey level to
achieve the same indication)

Some MUAs which operate in this correct manner do confuse users
sometimes by not handling the somewhat "un-natural" expunge operation
automatically.  However I find it's very easy to teach users about this
extra step by simply explaining to them that it gives them slightly more
control over when they choose to release these marked messages from the
the most immediate level of "undo" (or all possibility of undo if the
MUA doesn't support the "move to trash" feature).


> Guess I might need to take a look at the source if it's not in there,
> and see if it can be added ...

There's no logical sane way to do what _you_ think your customer might
think should happen.  IMAP does not work that way.  It cannot safely do
so.  Please think long and hard about interoperability with multiple
simultaneous MUA access, possibly from different types of MUAs.

I suppose being Cyrus is open-source software it could indeed be bent to
do illogical and/or unsafe things, but I think you really want to find
out the truth about how your users perceive the correct behaviour before
you go about abusing it into some caricature of what you think they
might want.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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