Re: Very disturbing feature in icedove
On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 10:58:19PM -0800, Steve Lamb wrote:
> Dave Sherohman wrote:
> > OK, one more time: Delete by default does not have to mean delete
> > *immediately* by default. Look at the underlined text above. I already
> > explicitly stated that I didn't mean immediate deletion and that delete-
> > on-folder-change or delete-on-exit are probably better,
>
> Uh, not in my mind. Maybe it stems from my years in the ISP business but
> generally users only want things deleted when they say they want it deleted.
> That doesn't mean "When they press the delete key" or even "After pressing the
> delete key and changing folders" or "after pressing the delete key and exiting
> the program." After they say, in its most conservative setting, is after they
> have configured the client to delete the way they want.
Going back two of my posts on this subthread, my statement calling the
decision to never permanently delete anything without an explicit request
from the user "questionable at best" started with "If the tool does not
provide a means to undelete messages..." I was responding to someone who
said that IceDove does not provide any way to access deleted messages,
in which case they would just be wasting disk space and providing no
security blanket for the user. Freddy Freeloader has since chimed in
and stated that IceDove does provide access to deleted messages, via
a Trash folder, so the basis of my earlier statement was incorrect.
Since IceDove allows undeletion, it is reasonable for it to not clean
out all marked-for-deletion messages at the earliest opportunity.
> Windows and OSX, by default, require the user to "empty the trash"...
> This is no different.
My original entry into this thread was a complaint about the terminology,
not the function. The average user understands that "empty the trash"
means "get rid of things I threw out." He is less likely to understand
that "compact disk" has that meaning.[1] That is, IMO, a very significant
difference.
(Your earlier post about "compact" having been used in databases since
forever is well taken, but the average user is not a DBA and cannot be
expected to be familiar with database terminology.)
> You have been told, repeatedly, where the knob is. Go twiddle it on your own!
I claim only that the knob is mislabeled.
Given Freddy's correction on the availability of undeletion, I don't
particularly care what the default setting is.
> Here's a bit of advice for you on software, a bit I give everyone about
> it. Your first step on any new piece of software, esp. applications and games
> (if you play them) is to see what you can configure and where.
Excellent advice, indeed.
[1] Unless the "trash can" is changed to a "trash compactor", I suppose,
but I've seen nothing in this thread to indicate that IceDove has made
that metaphoric change. Going to "trash compactor/compact disk" would
also carry the risk of users initially interpreting "compact disk" to
mean "delete everything on the disk", much as happened with early Macs,
where you dragged a floppy disk to the trash can to eject it.
--
Windows Vista must be the first OS in history to have error codes for things
like "display quality too high"
- Peter Gutmann, "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection"
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
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