Hi, Dr. Chudobiak,
On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak wrote:
>Would it be feasible to add an optional automatic "expunge after
>move/delete feature" to Binc, for admins who are willing to give up the
>ability to recover deleted emails?
The short answer is: no :-). I have a two reasons for being so direct
about this.
1) It's not IMAP, and therefore not Binc IMAP's job.
When the users can not purge their deleted messages now and then, there is
a problem with the user or the client; most likely the client. Not the
server, because the server already provides the tool for doing this and so
it's job is done.
Having a feature in the client that says "automatically purge when
deleted" or "move to Trash when deleted" is a good thing (yeay Mozilla),
but for an IMAP server it just adds complexity (=bugs) in a place where it
doesn't belong.
2) Options are evil!
It could seem natural to make this an optional feature, but we try to keep
the optionals down to a minimum. Most users don't ever touch 90% of the
configuration options in an IMAP server (should the server support ipv6?
enable flood block?), and the options then serve the sole purpose of
confusing the user.
For example, the "auto create inbox" option in the Mailbox section in
bincimap.conf is almost never changed to "no" (the admin can simply insert
a script before bincimapd if different behavior is needed anyway), and the
idle timeout setting (30 minutes) is also almost never increased because
it doesn't make sense. The "auth penalty" option is something people do
change, but there's no reason for doing so, because 4 seconds is
reasonable. These options should be removed. :-)
An option that says "automatically purge deleted messages" certainly has
some scratch-head value; I believe we are better off without it :-).
However,
a script that periodically removes deleted messages, is very feasable and
easy to write as a daily cron job:
for k in `ls /home`; do
if [ -d $k/Mail ]; then
find $k/Mail -type f | egrep '2,[A-Z]+?T' | xargs echo rm
fi
done
Too bad there's no easy way of figuring out when the \Deleted flag was set
from the file system alone, because then the script could delete only
messages that were marked more than 24/48 hours ago or so.
>Relying on users to remember to compact their folders periodically seems
>hopeless...
Heh, some like to keep their "Trash" folder forever, too :-).
Andy - never deletes non-junk messages
--
Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg
Author of Binc IMAP | "It is better not to do something
http://www.bincimap.org/ | than to do it poorly."
