Wow, that's a lot of confusion to read through!
Some of the confusion about IMAP vs POP appears to be due to the fact
that IMAP has an option "Mark as deleted". Rather than referring to
that option, there was reference to the way messages are deleted from
local mail folders by tagging the message for later deletion.
I think it's an excellent idea to compact folders when emptying the
trash and here's why:
The novice user shouldn't need to know that they should periodically
compact their mail folders. From the UI, there's no indication that a
folder with 0 messages in it could be taking up a lot of disk space.
To help keep this down, the perfect time to compact the folders is when
the person empties the trash. This makes Moz work like you'd expect.
Think about deleting files in Windows: When you delete a file, it's not
actually deleted, it just moves to the Recycle Bin. When you empty the
Recycle Bin, the file is actually deleted. The only diff is that in
Moz, the (potentially) time consuming effort of compacting the mail
folder is postponed until the user selects empty trash.
When a user gets a large attachment and wants to delete the message to
free up disk space, they expect that after deleting the message and
emptying it from the trash, they should have their disk space back.
It's already a two step process to get a message removed from your
filesystem. Why make it a three step process?! (delete message, empty
trash, compact folder)
The Amigo
