481722 - IMAP Feature Req: "Delete" vs. "Delete From Server"

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[James Butler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008051206 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.19 (20081209) (all builds)

It's probably easiest to describe in a "use case"-ish manner, so here goes:

My boss gets tons (many hundreds) of messages each day. He doesn't want to wade through all of them. He just wants to view the ones that pertain to him directly. He tasked me with wading through his messages and leaving the ones that he wants to see in the mailbox so he can go through them at the end of the day.

I collect mail from his mailbox. I look at all of his messages. Those that he does not want, I delete from my local view and delete from the server. What I am left with, locally, is all of the messages he will want to see. I do not want these messages hanging around my local installation, making things more and more difficult as time goes on.

With Calypso: The "Delete" key removes the local copy but keeps the server copy. Right-click=>"Delete from server" to ALSO remove them from the server IMAP mailbox.

With my boss's mail, I would right-click=>"Delete from server" to get rid of the unwanted messages completely, and then just "Delete" key the remaining (good) messages so that my local directory remained clean for the next go-round, and so that those messages remained on the server so my boss could collect them at the end of the day (or whenever he feels like it ... maybe on the weekend) without having to wade through the (deleted-from-server) unwanted messages.

My local directory stays clean, and the IMAP mailbox stays relevant for my boss.

With Thunderbird, "Delete" deletes everything ... locally and on the server.

I need to be able to discriminate between the two to maximize my efficiency and avoid taxing the server more than necessary (i.e. I could set up another account for him and forward the "good" messages to that account, but then I end up with ever-increasing numbers of duplicates and additional server loads during the redirection process.)


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Log in to IMAP server
2. Collect messages
3. Delete messages from local directory while leaving originals on server
Actual Results:  
1. Ok
2. Ok
3. Delete mechanism deletes both from local and from server

Expected Results:  
Request feature for option to leave on server with local removal (viewed messages gone from local but still available on server)

Please take a look at this feature as implemented by Courier email client: http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/Courier/

Also available in Courier's predecessor, Calypso and with The Bat! email client.

Comment 1

[James Butler]

While you're looking at Courier, please also check out its "Redirect" function. This is similar to "Edit as New", however it maintains the original "From" and "Reply-to" headers, which "Edit as New" does not. This would be useful for the same reasons noted in the above scenario ... if I need to send a message to my boss at another account, I could use "Redirect" to send him the original message and he doesn't need to scour the headers to find out who the "Reply-to" should be.

TBird already has behaviors SIMILAR to both "Delete from Server" (Compact) and "Redirect" (Edit as New), so the leap shouldn't be huge ... I hope. The program already can distinguish "flags" and so on, so extending those types of functionality might not be too complex, and is obviously within the realm of possibility, as demonstrated by Calypso, Courier, The Bat! and apparently one of the Apple clients, among others.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I am quite certain we closed a similar request as wontfix