[Dovecot] Idea: POP3 deletion as a flag

[Axel Luttgens]

Le 4 mai 2013 à 00:44, Timo Sirainen a écrit :

> I didn't ask what their main reason for this was, but for me it would be: "Oops, I accidentally configured my new email client as POP3 instead of IMAP, and now it deleted everything from my INBOX." With lazy_expunge the user would have to explicitly go and undelete the mails, and it would also undelete those mails that were intentionally deleted. With this feature nothing at all would go wrong on IMAP/webmail side.

Hello Timo,

I'll sure appear, once again, to be a bit dumb, but I'm somewhat uncomfortable with that "POP3 deletion as a flag" option.

As others already have noticed, this is liable to lead to confusion in the user's mind as well as to privacy concerns.

More specifically, a POP server is supposed to remove the messages marked as deleted when entering its update state. Unless I'm wrong, beside technical problems hindering that deletion, this is a mandatory behavior. Put in other words, if configured with the "POP3 deletion as a flag" option, the POP server won't be compliant anymore and users may feel betrayed. At the very least, this should probably come with some kind of experimental capability issued by the server in its reply to a CAPA command.

On the other hand: 

Le 3 mai 2013 à 21:49, Timo Sirainen a écrit :

> [...] And this feature was requested by a large customer of ours, so it is needed.. I was mainly wondering about details.

It is true that if an ISP wants such a feature, well...

But then, the problem appears because the ISP allows both POP and IMAP access to mail stores, and POP users should thus be treated as first class citizen too.

Let's suppose that I occasionally use an IMAP client that issues an EXPUNGE after I've inadvertently marked a lot of messages for deletion. Next time I've access to my usual computer with its POP client, I don't find those messages anymore. Wouldn't this need some kind of "IMAP expunge as flag" option as well?

OK, probably splitting hairs... ;-)

Axel