236922 - "Compact folders" should be renamed to "expunge"

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Lars Rohleder]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

I think new users of thunderbird will find it irritating that the IMAP
purge/expunge option is called "compact folders". Why not name it "Expunge"?
Or as a little help: "Compact folders (Expunge)"

Many who read this will think I should concentrate on "real" bugs or
enhancements. I just don't understand why this function has to be called
"compact folders".

I'm a little bit surprised I couldn't find anything relating this topic in
bugzilla. Maybe I can't use the search?

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Mark Duttweiler]

I'm not really bothered by the choice of wording... though admittedly "Compact
This Folder" might lead a user to believe that some sort of compression and/or
archiving is going to occur.

However, I _do_ think it is important to be consistent.  In

User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 (Macintosh/20040502)

under 

Tools, Account Settings, Server Settings

there is a check box to

Clean up ("Expunge") Inbox on Exit

If Thunderbird is to stick with "Compact This Folder", then it seems this should
be compact as well.  When I first saw "Compact This Folder", I assumed it must
mean expunge, until I saw the above checkbox, which lead me to believe that
maybe compact _does_ mean something different.  I guess I'm still wondering...

Comment 2

[Shawn Wilson]

Just to offer my personal experience... when I first switched to Mozilla Mail
about a year ago I was quite frustrated that I could not find the "expunge"
function. It was only after someone else showed me that "compact folder" did
what I needed that I knew what I was doing. So I think the wording could
definitely be a bit better.

Comment 3

[[e-mail]]

Maybe we need extra help for expunging IMAP messages.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Seamonkey bug 94251.

This isn't exactly a trivial bug, because it's not just a string change -- 
there's got to be logic to get the appropriate string based on the account type.

Comment 5

[Shaun]

I don't like this compact folder thing, when I delete something I want it off my
hard drive.  Better still, when my users delete something I don't want to have
to go to each of their folders and compact them (to prevent their mail from
'coming back' which happens with Thunderbird.

I want DELETE to mean DELETE and i thing it is a huge bug when I delete
something and it does get the $(#! off the god damn computer.

Thanks, great product keep up the good work!

Comment 6

[Aaron Whitehouse]

I just came on to add this bug. Looking through the bug reports, there seems to be a lot of people who are in the same position that I was.

I have been using TB since before the 1.0 release and always assumed that "Compact Folders" meant that it would compress the folder to trade-off access time for disk space. It was only when I was doing a major clean-up that I noticed the files were far bigger than they should be.

My gut feeling is that users expect mail to be deleted when they delete it. This leads from the standard file-system where a user deletes email to the bin and then empties the bin. In TB, one deletes the file, empties the bin and then has to "compact" the folders. I realise that this is due to the time it takes to clean up the files, but it is quite misleading. Because we are fighting what users expect, I think we need to be very clear with what is actually happening.

I think that the best solution would be to tie the function into the "Empty Trash" function - or at least provide the option to do so. As a first step, which is easy to implement, I think that the wording of the tool needs to be changed from "Compact Folders".

My suggested replacement for the File Menu would be "Purge deleted emails" or "Expunge deleted emails" (whichever is consistent with IMAP etc.). I think that it would be better to add more information in the preferences (above the "Compact Folders when it would save more than XKB"):

"When messages are moved or deleted from a folder the messages are moved to trash but the original message is not purged. However this message is not seen by the user in that folder.  Compacting folder(s) will remove these messages and will free up the disk space." (From: http://www.mozilla.org/quality/mailnews/tests/sea-mn-local-folders.html )

Comment 7

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I think the the alternative fix here is that we don't require new users to compact folders but do it automatically for them.  Something like auto-compact ( bug 286888 ) looks like a solution.