[Alpine-info] Web Alpine bugs

[Eduardo Chappa]

On Mon, 9 Jun 2008, Marius Micluta wrote:


:) The most severe problem, which determined me to downgrade from version 

:) 1.10 to version 1.00 is the anomalous functioning of filtering rules. 

:) Namely, when defining a rule to delete (i.e., expunge) or move deleted 

:) messages, the filtered messages are not displayed in the folder view on 

:) subsequent logins, but actually they are not expunged from the source 

:) folder.


This is the usual behavior of filters. Normally messages are expunged at 
the time the folder is closed. If it worked differently in version 1.00 it 
was probably a bug in 1.00, even though you would like to be that way, it 
is actually supposed to work the other way around.

The main technical issue is that *as designed*, the EXPUNGE command is 
"atomic", in the sense that it expunges *all* messages marked deleted, not 
just a few of them. This means that filtered messages, and those that are 
marked for deletion will be expunged. So if the filter sent an EXPUNGE 
command to the server, messages that you have marked for deletion will 
also be expunged, and that may not be desirable.

There is, however, an extension to IMAP, in RFC 4315, that could be used 
as a work around to this problem, but you need a server that supports the 
UIDPLUS extension, and that is not a guarantee. I think UW-IMAP started 
supporting UIDPLUS with the release of Alpine 1.00, so it is something new 
in that server too.

-- 
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/alpine/