This isn't a coherent feature request - virtual trash does address 
this, and if you want to discuss that or share other opinions, do it 
on the mailing lists.

I know the subject has been talked about a lot, it's about trying to 
delete a message that's bigger than

the quota the user has left on his/her account, and since imap doesn't 
support "moving" messages (as far as

i can tell, RFC1730 doesn't mention it, and even if it was so probably 
Maildir++ quotas don't either) the user

gets the dreaded "[ALERT] You exceeded your mail quota."



After spending a weekend trying to figure out a way around this, i 
think there could be a couple of workarounds,

not sure if the Virtual Trash Folder 
(http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/?id=1082) is intented to fix this issue, 
still

i would like to share my opionions about the matter.



Right now there are 2 ways for deleting messages:



1. Mark the deleted message (after that it's discounted from the 
user's quota), and then purging the messages manually

to get rid of them forever. This option also opens up an abuse 
possibility, a user can mark all his/her messages

as deleted, and never purge them, they will get discounted from the 
quota and he will be able to recieve new mail, and

even read the "marked-deleted" messages without a problem. The only 
drawback in this method is stetics on the inferface,

that you see a ton of marked messages, but having infinite quota beats that ;)



2. When you delete a message it gets "moved" to a trash folder of 
choice, it actually copies the mail first and then it

gets expunged. The problem with this is obvious, when the user is 
almost at full quota and the mail is bigger than the

quota he has left an error is given.



I personally like option number 2 for my users, but it doesn't work 
with full quota.

A solution for that is as follows:



1. Mark the message deleted (effectively reducing the user's quota)

2. Copy the "already deleted" message to the trash folder of choice

3. Expunge the message from INBOX

It is actually the same procedure as number 2, just backwards, first 
delete, and then "move".



For option number 1 i would also suggest an addition:

An option to delete-and-expunge on a single move, selectable on the 
options area, so that the user "knowingly"

selects it for use. I would even go as far to say, be able to have 2 
delete links, the normal delete link and

another which appears right beside it labeled Delete and expunge or 
something like that, this link could also be

an option for the user to choose.



Of course with my suggestion to option number 2 we also would open 
ourselves to having a trash folder full of

deleted messages which don't count towards the user quota and just 
clobber up space on the server, so for that

there could be a related option which forces purging of 
"mark-for-deletion" messages in the trash folder

automatically after x days, week, month whatever the sysadmin deems 
necessary, it could even be an administrator-only

option, just to keep users from filling up their filesystems with 
deleted messages.



There's even another solution for Courier-IMAP users, 
IMAP_MOVE_EXPUNGE_TO_TRASH=1

This conf option for C-IMAP daemon is useful in this situation, it 
automatically makes use of the "send to trash"

option, this is what happens:



1. Mark a message for deletion

2. Expunge the message

3. Courier-IMAP automatically makes a copy of the message on the trash folder

    that you configure on the imap conf-file, and it's copied without 
the delete mark.

What this does is allows us to kinda "move" the message to the trash 
folder, because the quota

doesn't get affected after the movement, the new message in the trash 
folder is counting towards

the user's quota. The only problem is that right now the way IMP works 
for this to happen can't use

the option "When deleting messages, move them.....", and when you go 
in the trash folder you have to

delete the messages there and purge'em. So IMP would need a little bit 
of tweaking to place a link

in this case to Delete all messages in this folder, or something like that.



Anyways, i hope someone could add any of this options to IMP.

Thanks again for this great open source software.



Cheers,

Ismael Sanchez A.