On 8/18/02 6:36 PM, "Justin Mayer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Right now I'm on a train and am working in off-line mode, trying to pare > down my IMAP in-box. I drag a message from my soon-to-be-discarded Mac.com > account's IMAP message list to a local "Archives" folder. Entourage throws > up a dialog and asks if I want to connect to the Internet to complete this > action. Why? Is there some action performed or some flag written to the IMAP > mail store when copying an IMAP message to a local folder? Even if so, is > this action something that cannot be recorded and performed during the next > connection? > > I find this behavior puzzling. If I delete an IMAP message, it notifies me > that my offline actions are being recorded and will be executed upon the > next connection. It notifies me just once and doesn't bug me about any > subsequent deletions. This is good. This is exactly what I want. So why does > Entourage then have to serve up a dialog to me each and every time I want to > copy a message to a local folder? I end up hitting "Cancel" -- knowing full > well that the message will be copied just fine anyway -- and then deleting > the IMAP message afterward. > > While this appears to me like a bug, I can only assume that there is a good > reason for this behavior. Can anyone enlighten me? > The whole point about IMAP is that it allows you to pretend that the server is on your computer: IMAP "folders" in Entourage represent regions of remote mail servers that you can access at will. You're supposed to forget that there's a separate cache on your machine and just move things around as you like - there's a degree of synchronicity built in, although more extreme manifestations (LiveSync) are options, partly dependent on the ability of the server to play along. One thing all IMAP accounts have is that when you select a folder, and in particular a message, on your computer, and do things with it - like move it to other IMAP folders or to delete it - the real message on the server follows suit. And simply selecting the header of a message downloads it: most people are set up so just selecting the folder downloads all unreceived messages. So when you select a message and drag to a local folder, it accesses the message on the server first: after all, you nay have only a header locally. When you're offline, you get that error message since it can't connect to the server to verify that it's really got the whole thing. I guess you're saying that when you're offline, it should just copy the cached copy to a local folder. that makes sense, but what should it do if you try to do the same thing with just a header? Maybe it would indeed be a good idea to implement just copying whatever is in the local cache - entire, message or header - but you'd forego the verification step that way. What if you move a message, or a header, to another one of the account's sever folders (as seen in Entourage, not for real)? Perhaps it would be difficult or impossible to record these moved for later synchronization on the server. You use message deletion as a precedent. But deletion is a special case: even if you've chosen the option of an "IMAP Deleted Items folder", that's really smoke and mirrors. What's actually happening is that the message is being "marked" for deletion (purging) on the server whenever it does its maintenance routines. Since all IMAP servers understand that, it probably wasn't very difficult to use the same marker when offline, which is activated when connected again. But probably most or all IMAP servers would not understand a similar setup for ALL moved or copied messages - far too complicated to keep track of them. Even if it _can_ be done by some, you'd get huge inconsistencies between servers, That's my guess anyway. But who knows? Maybe it could be done. Perhaps an MS person can answer. -- Paul Berkowitz -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
