[1939] in athena10
Mail folder policy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Evan Broder)
Sun Mar 29 05:08:26 2009
Message-ID: <49CF3A4C.40401@mit.edu>
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 05:07:24 -0400
From: Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>
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To: debathena@mit.edu
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I started trying to hammer out a config file for Thunderbird, and I'm
kind of unsure about how to deal with mail folders. Different
applications like to put things in different places. In particular,
alpine saves sent mail and drafts on the IMAP server, while Thunderbird
and Evolution both default to saving them within their profiles.
So there are, I guess, four options:
- Configure the MIT mail server, but leave all other folders at their
default
- Configure Evolution and Thunderbird to use IMAP folders for sent and
drafts, but match the local config and use the names "Sent" and "Drafts"
- Configure Evolution and Thunderbird to use IMAP folders with the same
name as alpine uses - "sent-mail" and "postponed-msgs"
- Configure Evolution and Thunderbird to use IMAP folders, and
configure alpine to use their folder names ("Sent" and "Drafts")
This is a bit of a balancing act between taking a hands-off approach to
configuration vs. making it easy for users to go back and forth between
mail clients. Given those two options, I have a strong preference for
the latter. If someone who usually uses Evolution logs in over ssh and
uses alpine, it seems pretty sucktastic that their sent mail wouldn't
normally be available to them.
Those 4 options are ranked in increasing order of my personal
preference, because I have a preference for the Evolution/TB-style names
over the alpine-style ones, but that's not for any reason other than the
fact that I'm used to them.
Another similar issue to this is what to do when a user deletes a
message - whether to mark them as deleted in the same folder or move
them to a trash folder.
At this point I have a fairly specific view of how I want /my/ mail
client to act, and I'm having a hard time telling if that's crowding my
design decisions, so I'd appreciate feedback.
- Evan
