Re: [Evolution] Set folders trash and junk/spam manually

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 12:41 +0200, Oliver Horn wrote:
> Well, why is evolution not able to subscribe to this folders as the mail
> server provides them and is instead creating virtual ones? Thunderbird
> for instance can do that.

There are really two issues here, because Trash and Junk need not be
treated the same (though Evo does treat them pretty much the same).

Trash is done the way it is because that's how IMAP is defined. Deletion
of a message is done in two stages, a) mark the message as \Deleted, b)
at some later date Expunge the folder. Other mailers do this
differently, mainly because they try to map message deletion onto the
mental model of file deletion on desktops, i.e. move the object to a
Trash folder and once in a while empty it. However doing this on IMAP is
inefficient (because the message is being copied -- note that IMAP has
no "move" operation) and can in rare cases block the user because of
quota limitations (leading to a situation where you can't delete your
mail to free up space because your quota won't allow it to be copied).

Evo follows the IMAP model closely. Deleted messages remain in place and
are not copied anywhere. Trash is simply a virtual (or search) folder
that shows all the \Deleted messages wherever they happen to be. This
has a nice side-effect: when you undelete a message Evo simply removes
the \Deleted flag. It doesn't need to remember where the message used to
be and move it back as other mailers do. Furthermore, Evo also applies
this model to other mailstores even if they don't use IMAP.

Moving on to Junk: the difference here is that IMAP has no builtin
concept of Junk, so Evo simply uses its own implementation and for
simplicity copies the Trash model. If you don't like this, feel free to
ask for an enhancemente at http://bugzilla.gnome.org.

poc