More mail bombs

[Tim Gaden over on Hawk Wings][hawkwings] [doesn’t agree][agree] that [Mail.app’s behaviour regarding deleting POP accounts is misguided][bomb].

His first point is that Mail.app gives you a big warning before doing the dirty. I don’t think that excuses the bad behaviour. Warning someone that you behave badly does not excuse that bad behaviour (my ex says this rule applies in more cases than the implementation of mail clients).

His second point is that the user should have a backup; with a good backup she can recover from her mistake when all those old messages disappear. I agree that people should have backups, but I don’t think that argument has any weight because you can imagine that the answer for all bad design decisions is “you should have had a backup”, in which case there are no bad design decisions.

The problem is that Mail.app’s insistence on a POP account being a separate set of folders means a message cannot appear in the Inbox unless it belongs to an account. If you delete a POP account then you have to move the messages to the Inbox of another account just to keep them appearing in the Inbox. This does not make sense.

Suppose you have a large history of messages received via a POP account. Then you delete that account and switch to an IMAP service with a meagre storage limit. If you want to keep those old messages appearing in the Inbox you must move your the historic Inbox messages to the IMAP account’s Inbox even though that will take up space on the server (and there may not be sufficient space on the server for them anyway). The other option is to give up the idea that old messages belong in the Inbox and just move them to local folders “On My Mac”.

If Mail.app provided a local Inbox folder that appeared as part of the unified Inbox then my objections would go away. (There should also be a corresponding local Sent folder.)

IMAP and POP are different in that a POP account’s mailbox is really just a temporary queue for messages that have yet to be retrieved by the client. Mail.app should recognize that difference and stop pretending that the two types of account are equivalent.

Quite pleased that Hawk Wings even knows my blog exists. Hawk Wings is good.

[hawkwings]: http://www.hawkwings.net/
[agree]: http://www.hawkwings.net/2010/07/07/mail-apps-disappearing-pop-mail-trick/
[bomb]: http://reliablybroken.com/b/2010/07/apple-mail-bomb/

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