Re: Very disturbing feature in icedove
On Saturday 10 February 2007 10:10, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 02:30:33PM +0000, Virgo Pärna wrote:
> > To make Thunderbird/Icedove to really delete those messages you can
> > use File, Compact Folders and you can specify configuration option
> > "Compact folders when it will save over XXX kB" (you can also specify
> > specific amount of disk space).
>
> Oh, I see. "Compact" means "really delete the messages that I said to
> delete, but are actually just marked as deleted, not physically deleted".
> How incredibly obvious.
Do a Google search of "compact database" and see how many hits you get. (I
get about 28 million.) It's a perfectly common term. Follow a few of those
links and read what you find. Marking records with a deleted tag and not
actually deleting them until you compact the database is standard database
behavior. It's been around for some twenty five years or so.
The behavior you find so appalling is standard behavior among modern,
database- type MUAs. Yes, Outlook does it. So does KMail. So does
Evolution. They all have a "Trash" folder. When you delete an email, it
gets moved into the "Trash" folder. They can all be configured to handle the
trash in different ways. It can sit there until you manually deleted. It
can sit until it's been there for a user specified length of time. Trash can
be emptied upon exit, with or without a prompt. There are all sorts of
options and they're all under your control. All you have to do is learn to
use the program that you have on your computer.
> I think I'll side with the people who think this obscure use of the word
> "compact" is a bug in IceDove
As I pointed out above, it's neither obscure nor a bug. It's standard
terminology and behavior.
> (and just continue using mutt).
Mutt is a perfectly fine email program. Once you invest the time to learn how
to use it. Hmm, guess that's true about a lot of programs, huh?
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