On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 12:11:03PM -0500, Cyrus Daboo wrote:
Hi Michael,
--On Tuesday, March 16, 2004 2:22 PM +0100 Michael Haardt
<michael(_at_)freenet-ag(_dot_)de> wrote:
| Some mail systems allow the concept of "rolling/automatically expiring"
| mailboxes/folders which automatically remove old mail, which is useful
| for mailing lists and junk mail folders. It is important that this
| function is not performed by the client, because clients usually don't
| clean up during vacation.
|
| For that reason, I suggest a Sieve extension, which allows the mail
| system to remove mail. There are several ways to address the problem:
I'm afraid I still think expiration like this belongs in the mailstore not
the delivery agent.
Unfortunately I can see both perspectives :-)
I do understand yours, or at least I think I do. You want to have
mailstore attributes that control this particular combination of mail
folder operations.
The other one is that the agent acts just like I do, only I'm not
sitting at the keyboard. I can sit down at my computer and access a
folder and make sure I have less than 100 messages in it when I
leave. I do this using existing primitive access functions.
Similarly, I could tell my sieve-enabled LDA to follow this same
methodology. The issue of "what if some other access access doesn't
do this" is a red herring. I can manually open up the folder using a
mail client and treat the folder in a different way... so? It's the
same thing: it's me doing the access whether I've told an agent to do
it, whether I access using my keyboard, or whether I told another
agent to do something else. If I do conflicting things it's my
choice, and it may or may not be an error. I don't think I need an
IMAP extension to allow primitive operations to be combined in these
ways.
Personally I wouldn't want to use a system that required me to
configure my folders for each kind of access I wanted to do, or each
way that I wanted to use them. Nor would I want to use mail folders
that had side-effects when I accessed them. I can respect that others
might want this, though-- it's just not my mindset.
I can also respect an opinion that SIEVE only operates on a single
message, and yeah, I see that point. But if SIEVE is the filtering
language in my LDA of choice (and it is), and I would like to have
some interaction with an existing mailstore (and I do), some level of
access to an existing store is not really out of place.
Anyway, I'm not trying to repeat myself here, just providing what
I hope is a little more light. I doubt anyone who has the other
perspective will be convinced, though.
Yours,
-mm-