[Dovecot] Idea: POP3 deletion as a flag

[Timo Sirainen]

On 3.5.2013, at 22.40, Professa Dementia <professa at dementianati.com> wrote:

> Be careful about adding features just for the sake of adding features. Dovecot is already a powerful, but quite complex.  This would make it even more complex and non-standard.  POP and IMAP clients do not expect this behavior from the server.  Also, I have never heard anyone request this feature.

Dovecot won't do that by default. And this feature was requested by a large customer of ours, so it is needed.. I was mainly wondering about details.

> Google is large enough that they are under scrutiny and have to obey EU privacy laws.  However, adding this feature to Dovecot could put smaller email operators in violation of those laws.  Not deleting emails when the client says to, is effectively archiving, and data that is archived is regulated by EU privacy laws. Lots of legal problems have arisen as a result of this.

I'll add a comment to the setting that enabling it may violate (EU) privacy laws.