Message deletion wisdom

[Jani Nikula]

On Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:32:04 -0700, Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins at finestructure.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 03 2012, Jacek Generowicz <jacek.generowicz at cern.ch> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Hi, Jacek.  You are right on both of these points.  It has indeed been a
> controversial topic.  However, I would say that we have reached a stasis
> in terms of our response to this issue.  I'll try to summarize here.
> 
> I can say with a very high degree of certainly that notmuch will NEVER
> gain the capability to actually delete mail files from disk itself.  It
> is too risky for notmuch to be involved in that, and it's too easy to do
> it outside of notmuch (e.g. "notmuch search --output=files tag:deleted |
> xargs rm").  This has never really been up for discussion.

To amend that (with mostly historical and not so helpful info), notmuch
used to have the ability to sync the "deleted" tag with the T
("trashed") maildir flag (with maildir.synchronize_flags option
set). Other mail clients or offlineimap were then able to delete the
mails locally and/or on a server. However, this too had some issues
(concerning multiple files with the same message-id) making it
potentially dangerous, and was removed [1]. Whether this feature ever
makes a comeback depends on someone tackling the problems. And taking
into account the fact that current users of the deleted tag probably do
not expect the files to be actually deleted.

[1] http://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch/commit/2c262042ac174d7bc96d6035ab9c88bd0abe7f35

BR,
Jani.