Deleting messages

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Sat, 2010-04-03 at 13:24 -0400, Joseph Brennan wrote:
> 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.

+1; "Expunge" is the correct term.
-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org> LPIC-1, Novell CLA
<http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com>
OpenGroupware, Cyrus IMAPd, Postfix, OpenLDAP, Samba