Re: Commit mailbox, good idea?

[Jim Bowen <jim zereau net>]

On 13-Apr-99 Ramin Miraftabi wrote:
>> 
>> Imagine a mailbox that has, say, 5000 1k-10k messages in it.
> 
> How many 'normal' users have such mailboxes?

I never said it was common :)

Yeah, an option for immediate purge should definitely keep 99% or more of
people happy.

Thinking about it, many of the mailers out there that handle mbox format mail
boxes actually only purge when the mailbox is closed - pine, xfmail, etc.

>> I'd say that auto-committing would be good on exit or on a configurable
>> periodic basis, though.
> 
> How 'bout a option on how to do this, delete when deleted or delete 
> on commit, with the above ideas used as well. And of course a good
> kbd shortcut to commit (like elm's $).
> 
> My rationale is, that most users probably don't have such mailboxes and 
> are probably baffled if they need to separately delete the messages. I know
> my wife would be baffled by something like that ;)

It should _definitely_ be friendly, whatever happens, and it should be pretty
intuitive. I'd say it was probably OK to flag the mails as deleted, without
committing the changes to disk.... Hmmm, would it be possible to finter the
view of mail in the box to not show the deleted stuff? That would make it look
like instant delete in all cases, but you could commit to disk based on user
policy, mailbox size, or any other scheme you liked...


Jim
---
jim@zereau.net