542672 - need mail.imap.expunge_after_delete setting to be a per-account setting rather than a global setting

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, enhancement)

Description

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) 
Gecko/20091204 Thunderbird/3.0

Evidently, when TBird's filter "moves" a matched email to another folder,
it actually creates a copy in that other folder, and marks the original
as hidden in the Inbox, but doesn't actually remove it from the Inbox.
TB no longer shows the message in the Inbox, but Entourage, Microsoft's Exchange email client for MacIntosh, sees those "hidden" messages plainly, 
and marks them unhidden again.  After Viewing the Inbox with Entourage, Thunderbird sees all those messages in the Inbox again.  They then appear in two places, the Inbox, and in the folder to which the filter ostensibly 
"moved" them when it first saw them.  Then there's no easy way to tell which messages have been previously seen and "moved", and should be deleted.  

More importantly, whether Entourage marks them unhidden or not, they continue to consume space in the Inbox folder that counts against the mail account's quota.  That's the real problem here.  

The bottom line is that when I use TB to "move" a message to another folder, 
I need to be 100% sure there is no hidden copy of it left behind.  That also 
goes for when "deleting" messages by moving them to the "deleted messages" 
folder.  

Please treat this as a major problem.  Unless some solution becomes available
soon, my employer may disallow the use of TB in the workplace. :(

Comment 1

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

This also is an issue for messages that I have deleted.  If I use TB to delete
a message in the inbox, it is copied to the "Deleted messages" folder 
(Exchange's trash folder), and is marked hidden in the Inbox, but remains in
the inbox.  

I just want one copy of the message.  I don't want to the delete button to 
cause me to have two copies.  I don't want it to cause me to have zero copies.
I want it to move the ONE copy from whatever folder it was in to the trash 
(Deleted Messages) folder, and really move it, not leaving a copy of it behind.

Comment 2

[Kent James (:rkent)]

What do you have set for "When I delete a message" in the IMAP account setup?

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

Nelson, you can set mail.imap.expunge_after_delete to true, and we will do an imap expunge after every delete.

Comment 4

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> What do you have set for "When I delete a message" in the IMAP account setup?

- Move it to this folder: "Deleted Messages" (which is exchange's trash folder)

This evidently invokes the move-leaves-a-copy-behind problem that is the subject
of this bug report.

(In reply to comment #3)
> Nelson, you can set mail.imap.expunge_after_delete to true, and we will do an
> imap expunge after every delete.

I'll try that and see what difference it makes.  Thanks for the suggestion.

Comment 5

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

The good news is that setting mail.imap.expunge_after_delete to true did solve
the problem for my IMAP account on the exchange server.  

The bad news is that it introduced a new problem on my other IMAP account, 
which is not an exchange server.  My other IMAP account has some huge folders.
Now, every time I delete a message in any of those folders, it takes a long 
time (up to a whole minute) to complete, and if I attempt to do something else
in that same folder before it completes, bad things may happen (server errors 
are reported, deleted messages may be lost rather than being moved to the 
trash folder).  

Note that I do NOT have any of those huge folders marked to be kept for 
offline use on my local system.  In fact, I have unchecked the "Keep messages for this account on my computer" box in the preferences for this second (non-exchange) IMAP server.  So, I don't know why it takes so long to delete 
a message.  It shouldn't have any large local files to "compact".  

Anyway. I think this mail.imap.expunge_after_delete setting should probably 
be a per-account setting rather than a global setting.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

morphing bug to ...
> Anyway. I think this mail.imap.expunge_after_delete setting should probably 
> be a per-account setting rather than a global setting.