Deleting messages

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Fri, 2010-04-02 at 21:00 -0400, Joseph Brennan wrote:
> --On Friday, April 2, 2010 5:30 PM -0700 Nybbles2Byte 
> <nybbles2byte at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Okay, I am sure this is stupid question but how do you really delete
> > messages. When I delete messages in my email client and then log in to
> > see the mailbox through a web program I see that the message are marked
> > as deleted but still there.
> That's what "delete" does.  It marks the messages deleted.  You can still
> undelete them, in case of error.
> Then the command "expunge" removes all messages marked deleted.  For no
> known reason some clients call this "purge" instead of "expunge".

For the record: recent versions of Cyrus also support "delayed expunge",
where even messages that have been 'expunged' can be recovered for a
time without having to resort to extra-ordinary means [restore from
backup & reconstruct mailbox].  This feature has to be specifically
activated.

Awesome feature.