Zitat von "E. John Messersmith III" <e...@ejm3.net>:

Well, I don't know what Gmail is doing either but the iPhone gets it right
in all cases and all clients get it right when using Gmail. I'm
not being angry here just very frustrated. I don't know how I can be any
clearer. It is either a configuration parameter of IMAP or Horde or both.

Webmail - which I think is also part of the Horde project - gets it right
too! So what is it doing? I go to Mail Options->Deleting and Moving Messages and I simply check the option "When deleting messages, move them to your Trash folder instead of marking them as deleted?" I select a message and click the Delete link. No marking for deletion; no counting; no nothing - just a simple move from one folder to another - everything is still in one Mailbox. So the "delete" command simply gets translated (or is made equivalent to) a "move" to the trash folder command. The client doesn't have to do anything. As long as the server moves the message to the trash folder the new state is simply reflected (updated) in the client. Why is this so difficult to understand? Is there something obvious I'm missing?

So my question remains: given that I have selected the correct Webmail option (and set the corresponding option in all my clients), why is it when a remote IMAP client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail) executes a "delete" command and that command is received by the IMAP server is it not translated into a "move" to the trash folder command?

Sorry to say that, but you actually are missing quite a lot.  ;-)
Your cited words seem to indicate that you totally misunderstand how the IMAP functions work. There is no such such thing as a simple "delete command", nothing gets translated on the server site, in fact the concept of a "trash folder" is totally unknown to the IMAP protocol and on IMAP servers. All that "trash folder magic" is a thing that the various clients handle on their own, be it native Windows Clients or Webmail-Clients like IMP. And when you want several clients to behave the same way, you have to configure all of them individually. And if they don't support your preferred options, you're out of luck.

Some more technical details:

Admittedly, the deletion of mail messages on an IMAP server is somewhat unusual. It is a two-step process, first you "mark messages as deleted" and then you "expunge" them.

About step 1: Each mail message on the server has a few flags or marks which can be read and written by the clients. One of these flags is the "delete flag". And the process of setting this delete flag is what commonly is described by the phrase "marking as deleted". Such marked messages are still on the server and can be used in every other way. How they are presented to the human reader depends on the used client.

About step 2: The "expunge" command is given for a whole mail folder and "really" deletes all messages which were previously "marked as deleted".

This "IMAP native" mail deletion technique should normally be available as one option in all IMAP mail clients.

Now to the "trash folders", this is something completely different. Such a folder has no special meaning on the server side, it is just an IMAP folder like you can have others. It is only used by the client for a special purpose. When you have set appropriate client options, then the clients moves "deleted mails" to this folder and does not use the above described IMAP deletion. Actually this mail-move is also not a totally simple process, as there is no native "move command" in the IMAP protocol, only a "copy command". So with every move (including the moves to the trash) the client has to copy the mail to the destination folders and delete it in the source afterwards (e.g. with the IMAP delete functions again).

Hope these explanations helped a little to clear up the confusions.   ;-)

Best regards,

Jochen Roderburg
RRZK
University of Cologne
Robert-Koch-Str. 10                    Tel.:   +49-221/478-7024
D-50931 Koeln                          E-Mail: roderb...@uni-koeln.de
Germany


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