On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 03:35:29PM -0600, Kyle Wheeler wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On Wednesday, December 17 at 03:15 PM, quoth David Young: > > Today I have found that if I save a message M in IMAP folder F to > > the same folder F, and then I sync folder F by tapping '$', then > > message M is no longer present in F. > > Interesting - I wonder if maybe your IMAP server is trying to be > helpful in a nonstandard way. > > > This is different behavior than I expect for two reasons: saving a > > message should not be a destructive operation, no matter what the > > destination folder. > > Unfortunately, the way it works normally is that "moving" a message > between IMAP folders is actually a copy-then-delete-the-original > operation. I believe the reason for this is buried in the problems of > dealing with multiple IMAP clients accessing the same folder (the > fewer semantics you have, the better), but I'm not certain. In any > case, mutt is showing you how things "really work". If you check out > the IMAP RFC, there's a "COPY" command, but not a "MOVE" command. So > all "move" operations are actually destructive operations > > My guess is that what is happening is this: as always, mutt tells the > server to copy the message and then tells the server to delete the > original. On *MOST* IMAP servers, the copy operation will create a > duplicate message even if the destination is the same as the source. > However, I'm guessing that on your server, copying a message into the > folder it's already in is considered a no-op, so no actual copying > occurs. Then, when mutt deletes the original, it's deleting the *only* > copy of the message. > > If that's what's going on, then your mail server is broken; the COPY > command is supposed to be able to create duplicate messages. > > The way to test this is to see what happens when you use mutt's > <copy-message> function instead of <save-message> (by default, > copy-message is triggered by tapping C). When you copy a message from > a folder into the same folder, does your IMAP server produce a > duplicate message?
I just tried this on my inbox. 'C' works as expected: it duplicates the message. 's' deletes. The IMAP server is Dovecot. Dave -- David Young OJC Technologies dyo...@ojctech.com Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933
