Deleting messages

[Joseph Brennan]

Nybbles2Byte <nybbles2byte at gmail.com> wrote:

> Expunge sounds more like a legal term
> than anything to do with software and I'm surprised that it became an
> official
> command as programmers would far more likely think of purge first.
> Perhaps a
> non-programmer came up with that one.


"Expunge" comes from the MM client developed in the 1970s.  One of the
developers, Mark Crispin, designed the IMAP protocol in 1986, and he
carried over the term Expunge as the command to remove messages marked
deleted.

<http://www.columbia.edu/acis/email/mm.home/mmmanual/8.about.mm.html>

I can't think of a good reason not to use the term that the protocol
uses, since it is a word people know and using it would make it simpler
to discuss commands applicable to any IMAP client.

I first saw "purge" used in the mid 1990s.  I don't know whether it
first appeared in the Exchange Client (the interoffice memo and
scheduling client that became Outlook) or Netscape Navigator (one
the first GUI IMAP clients).  It was an unfamiliar term and I did
not understand why it was being used.  None of the old email clients
used it, nor did the POP or IMAP protocols.


Joseph Brennan
Columbia University Information Technology