Re: [Evolution] Stupid MUA Behavior (Trash)

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj novell com>]

Jeffrey D. Means wrote:

On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 10:09 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
  

On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 07:45 -0600, Jeffrey D. Means wrote:
    

Why is it that when using Evolution as a MUA with IMAP when I delete a
piece of mail I have to take a 4 step process to actually delete the
trash:
1: Pressing delete places it in the Evolution Trash folder for the
IMAP account
      

hitting delete on a message in, say, INBOX, just flags the message as
deleted (this is how IMAP works, and in fact, all other mail clients)
    

True it does flag it as deleted but it places it in the Evolution/Trash
folder under the IMAP account which you have to expunge to get the
message moved to the Account/Inbox/Trash folder where you again have to
flag it as deleted then expunge that folder to actually delete the
message.
  

it sounds to me that the heart of your problems is to be blamed on the IMAP server (Courier IMAP most likely) which implements its own Trash folder by moving messages which have been expunged (expunge == removed permanently, hence why this server "feature" is crack) and placing it in its own Trash folder behind Evolution's back.

I only found this to be true after wondering where I had tied up 500MB
of space in my Maildir on the server I run.  It turned out I had over 1
million messages going back over the past year that were flagged as
deleted but not expunged from my IMAP trash folder.  As I just proved
that you really have to delete the message in a 4 step process as I
outlined earlier.  Also you have to expunge _each_ folder individually
to ensure that the message really is removed from the folder not just
marked deleted (this is probably IMAP standard behavior.)  The software
I am running is courier-IMAP with qmail behind it.
  

aha, just as I suspected... Courier-IMAP. Not surprised in the least...

this is only a problem with Courier-IMAP because it doesn't actually comply with the IMAP specifications, it makes stuff up as it goes along (not only does it not implement the IMAP protocol properly - we have many workarounds already in the code - but it also extends IMAP in ways that are completely on crack)


My suggestion: get a real IMAP server like Cyrus, Dovecot, uw.imap, etc. Stay well away from Courier...

With any proper IMAP server, it's a 2-step process. Delete message in folder. Expunge folder (or Empty Trash whuich expunges all the IMAP account's folders). All gone.

Jeff