Re: [Evolution] IMAP and Expunge

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 14:01 -0700, Al Niessner wrote:
> I would be remiss if I did not point out that if trash were
> Trash, then why do we have the Junk folder for spam?

You don't see the difference between "stuff I've decided I don't need
any more" and "stuff I don't want to see even once"?

The *only* reason for having a Junk folder is that no spam filter is
perfect, so you might need to mark a false positive and recover the
message (and retrain the filter). Otherwise it could just be permanently
deleted at once -- in fact some filters (external to Evo) allow you to
do that.

And the *only* reason for having a Trash folder is to allow you to
change your mind about deleting something (even Junk). Otherwise it
could just be expunged immediately. In fact some clients (Thunderbird
for example) allow you to configure that.

Your comments on Trash notwithstanding, the distinction between Trash
and Junk is universal among current email clients, as is the fact that
they all implicitly assume that Trash will at some point be expunged and
not live on forever. If you want it to live forever (e.g. because of
regulatory requirements) there are archiving systems for that, again
outside the mail client, or you can set up a different filtering system
as had been suggested. But I doubt the Evo devels are going to change
the concept of Trash to fit your working practices since they aren't
what most people are used to or expect.

As to the idea of using searching rather than filing in folders, that's
perfectly reasonable and is the basis of Gmail, but it has nothing to do
with Trash as such. Also, I'm not sure that Evo is really suited to
doing this on a large scale. It's true that it does a lot of indexing,
which most MUAs don't, but I think it needs work on the user interface
for this to really effective.

poc