Re: Send Mail / messaging / misc. ramblings

[Jim Bowen <jimb zereau net>]

On 08-Dec-1999 Jules Bean wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, Mike Palczewski wrote:
> 
>> as far as the mailboxes close current will close the mailbox that is 
>> in the front in the main window.  close will close the the window selected
>> in the mailbox list.  
>> IMHO that whole mailboxes menu is not neaded.  how about a close button
>> on the toolbar.  and automatic commits, deleting a message will move
>> it to the trash and commit the mailbox. 
> 
> Automatic commits as an option, yes.  But not required.
> 
> There are really two different approaches to message deletion.  One is the
> 'mark deleted' followed by 'actually delete'.  The other is 'move to
> trash' followed by 'empty trash'.
> 
> The first approach is the traditional one used in IMAP, so I think we
> should support it at least for IMAP.  The second is more familiar to many
> people, and we should definitely support that too.

The problem with instant delete is that it does not scale at all well to large
MBOX format mailboxes.

If you have 500 7k emails and you want to delete one of the ones in the middle,
then you have a 3.5Mb file copy to perform. If you are going through the
mailbox deleting a lot of the messages, then...

A good option is to flag them as deleted, and also copy to trahs, and don't
show them on screen, and then garbage collect as some future point. (As done by
Netscape, Eudora, Outlook Express (well, kinda), etc.


Jim
---
jimb@zereau.net