[2056] in athena10
Re: Mail folder policy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Price)
Sat Apr 4 23:08:51 2009
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2009 23:08:21 -0400
From: Greg Price <price@MIT.EDU>
To: Evan Broder <broder@mit.edu>
Cc: Tim Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>, debathena@mit.edu
Message-ID: <20090405030820.GA21912@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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The mail should definitely end up in IMAP. Sitting in the Athena
homedir makes it completely inaccessible from webmail, the
least-common-denominator client.
Note that this already means users of the thunderbird locker, if any,
will have to move their mail if they want to follow the new config.
Users of the sipb locker's mutt, if they have not configured it
themselves, have lost their sent mail entirely and have nothing to
move.
So in that case we might as well make a common location for all the
clients. To minimize the impact of tabbott's concern, the common
location should probably be the one used by the only client that
already sticks the mail in a reasonable location, namely pine/alpine
in sent-mail and postponed-msgs.
Also, lower-case names are friendlier to people like me, using mutt,
who type (or at least tab-complete) them.
Greg
On Sat, Apr 04, 2009 at 06:33:55PM -0400, Evan Broder wrote:
> Does anybody actually have an opinion on this? Because if not, then I'll
> just do what I want, which is option 4 (all clients are configured to
> store in Sent and Drafts on the IMAP server).
>
> I'll give people until Thursday to object, at which point I'll declare
> consensus and start implementing.
>
> - Evan
>
> Evan Broder wrote:
> > This is a hard to avoid problem. As it stands, it's already possible for
> > people's sent mail to end up in two different places - they just have to
> > send mail from two different clients.
> >
> > - Evan
> >
> > Tim Abbott wrote:
> >
> >> It seems to me that there are transition issues with changing the
> >> sent-mail folder from the default, as it would result in any existing
> >> users having their sent mail in two different places.
> >>
> >> Or am I missing something?
> >>
> >> -Tim Abbott
> >>
> >> On Sun, 29 Mar 2009, Evan Broder wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
