Message deletion wisdom

[Jacek Generowicz]

Hello,

Looking through the archives of this list, I see that the topic of
message deletion is, if not controversial, then at least non-trivial.

+ Requests for the provision of message deletion mechanisms have
  appeared many times, and that various patches addressing the issue
  have been submitted, and (IIUC) some of these are awaiting review
  and might possibly make it into an official release in the future.

+ Having the 'deleted' tag cause messages to be deleted is,
  apparently, fraught with peril of losing mail.


I have two questions:


1) Could you give me a summary of the dangers of allowing notmuch to
   actually delete mail?

2) How do you deal with mail that you would like to disappear from
   your maildirs/IMAP servers? (An Emacs-based slant would be
   particularle welcome.)


Thank you for your input.