RE: [Exim] Maildirsize files: opinions sought

Dennis Skinner wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-02-13 at 02:35, Eli wrote:
>> They even went in and
>> added some feature to auto purge the Trash folder after x days or
>> whatever. I wouldn't want to imagine the number of calls/emails my
>> clients would send when they find out a message they wanted trashed
>> but saved got nuked.
>
> That's just silly. When was the last time you put an item you wanted
> to save in your kitchen trash at home? Do you get mad at the garbage
> men when they take it away? Trash is just that, trash. If you make
> it a policy that items in Trash get deleted after Xdays, they won't
> complain. Currently, we use 14days. No complaints yet.
>
> In the several years that I have been providing support to various
> companies (all of which have had such policies), I have only heard
> complaints about autodeletion of trash maybe 2 times. I make the same
> kitchen trash analogy (and at this point, they usually feel kinda dumb
> for complaining) and suggest that if, they really wanted to save those
> items, put them in a "Saved" or archive them to monthly folders or
> even use a "Pre-Trash" folder.

I'd love to agree, and I for one wouldn't be one of the people to complain
when my trash was suddenly cleaned out - however if I didn't know about it
(and trust me, *our* clients do NOT read the email that we send them with
all the info they need about their new account with us), I'd be a bit
interested as to why. I DO however mark things for deletion even though I
want to keep them (in IMAP of course). I mark everything I don't want to
keep (but may want to refer to later on in the week) as deleted, and only
keep the real important stuff undeleted. Now this wouldn't be affected of
course, but we do have numerous clients who use some webmail systems we
have, and I believe some of the defaults on those webmail systems are to
move items to a Trash folder when you want to delete them (rather than mark
them deleted). I do know that quite a few of our clients are not Internet
savvy, and if any email (yes, even in a Trash folder) went missing, they'd
have a hoot complaining about it. Of course my immediate rebuttal would be
"why put something you need in a folder called Trash", but as they always
say in customer support (and especially trying to keep clients happy), the
client is always right.

>
> Immediate deletion or deletion upon logout is probably a bit too much,
> but 7, 10, or 14 days is plenty of time to realize an error. The
> Trash folder is a convenience incase you make a mistake, it is not for
> storage.

Even so if the Trash folder is a convinence and should not be considered a
storage place for wanted email, *FORCING* deletion of messages WITHOUT the
option of turning that off per user is very wrong. I've always been the
advocate of "do nothing, and let individual people do something if they
want" (or at the very least if you force everyone, let there be an off
switch for individuals). Unfortunately in the way I understand
Courier-IMAPs auto trash deletion, its on or off for everyone - no per user
settings, which I personally disagree with (thus turn it off).

Anyways, this is steering away from the topic and should really be on the
courier-imap discussion list (of which I'm not a member) so "that's all I
have to say about that".

Eli.