Subject: imap uid expunge support (from uidplus extension) ?

From: "Hein Roehrig" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 19:25:47 +0100

Dear list,

browsing internal.txt it appears that there is no direct way to expunge a
single message. Is support if the UIDPLUS extension's UID EXPUNGE command
planned (or already implemented somewhere) ?

Thanks in advance for any advice,
Hein
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
 For information about this mailing list, and its archives, see: 
 http://www.washington.edu/imap/c-client-list.html
------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 11:08:44 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

> planned (or already implemented somewhere) ?

In general, I encourage application writers not to think about expunging
single messages, and instead to think exclusively in terms of the
delete-expunge model.  Of course this is not always possible to do; e.g.
spam filters may want to expunge messages identified as spam without
touching deleted messages.

There is no plan to implement the UIDPLUS extension at the current time.
In spite of what I said in the previous paragraph, the reasons for not
having UIDPLUS are primarily technical; it isn't an attempt to enforce the
use of the delete-expunge model.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

---

From: Hein Roehrig <[email-masked]>
Date: 24 Feb 2003 16:37:36 +0100

On Sun, 2003-02-23 at 20:08, Mark Crispin wrote: 
> delete-expunge model.

I am trying to implement a slight extension of this model. Instead of
expunging all messages, I prefer to expunge only messages that have been
deleted for, say, a week. This is similar to what (ex)mh does and it has
the great advantage of permitting "second thoughts" for all messages for
one week. 

Since IMAP (nor any of the currently proposed extensions, AFAIK) does
not allow the date of deletion, I was trying to write a little script
that would log on to the IMAP server, expunge all messages that have a
user-defined flag set, and set this flag for all messages marked
deleted.

The workaround proposed in the UIDPLUS RFC (i.e., temporarily removing
the \Deleted flag) strikes me as an ugly and dangerous solution.

> use of the delete-expunge model.

What is the main impediment? Is it the CAPABILITY handling, the idea
that all operations should work on all backend drivers, ... ? 

Off topic: I would also appreciate comments on other APIs for accessing
IMAP and other mail stores from Perl (or another scripting language,
Java being about as far down as I would be willing do go...)

Thanks,
Hein