Going to try to keep it short for a change... :-)

> It sounds to me a though you are suffering some sort of post-traumatic
> stress as a result of having had a hard time with outlook's auto-
> archive.

No, I usually disabled it in Outlook. I just noticed that MLO seemed
to borrow the paradigm, but then added options which make
"autoarchive" a misnomer since the feature can be configured to copy
or delete items instead of just moving them.

> Many of your suggestions seem to me to be nothing more than
> trying to stamp out the words "auto-archive." I think this would be a
> shame, as they are widely used words that are understood by many
> people. Changing to a somewhat  fuzzier phrase about cleaning up
> completed tasks does not sound helpful to me.

I admit I'm nitpicking about the name, but the name does not
accurately represent all of the feature's options. Imagine going into
a restaurant where all the sandwiches are called turkey sandwiches
regardless of what's on them. You order a vegetarian sandwich and your
friend orders a hamburger. The waiter reads back your order: "That
would be one vegetarian turkey sandwich and one ground beef turkey
sandwich, correct?" The name "turkey sandwich" in this case is
confusing and misleading, just as the term "*archive" is misleading
when used to describe the action of copying or deleting.

Variations of the phrase "clean up completed tasks" are used
extensively in the autoarchive settings dialog. I don't think changing
the feature name to more accurately reflect the capabilities of the
feature would cause any confusion in this case. I do understand that
none of the changes I've proposed on behalf of confused new users
everywhere are likely to be implemented in MLO anytime soon, if at
all, but maybe these discussions will help other confused newbies.

> I don't think that your option 2 works. You mention confusion any time
> you need to unhide completed, but  it's not just that. As the database
> grows to hold all the completed tasks it will get heavy and eventually
> slow your system down.

Clicking the "clean up completed tasks" button would perform the same
action that autoarchive currently performs. The only difference is
that people who would otherwise have autoarchive prompt before running
could now do it on-demand instead of having to wonder whether
autoarchive will do the right thing.

> My auto-archive usage is that daily, I move all completed tasks to an
> archive file. Sometimes I need to research something from the archive
> so it's nice to  have it. This works fine for me and I have no
> problems and nothing is mystifying. The only issue is that I have to
> mark recurring tasks that have subtasks a do-not-archive, as you
> mentioned. I would like to see a default setting for this.
> -Dwight

Thanks for sharing your archive settings; I'm glad I asked before
trying autoarchive. I had hoped autoarchive would auto-skip recurring
tasks but would have half expected yet another checkbox for that. (NO!
Please do not take that remark as a feature request! :-P) I wouldn't
expect everyone to consider that potential pitfall up front. Did you
have to figure out the hard way that you have to mark recurring tasks
as do-not-archive?

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