On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Christof Drescher wrote: > That's the problem of the "ding-dong", not the problem of the server > developer. > It's a bad argument to say "don't do it, because someone could misuse it".
Painful lessons of the past 30 years indicate that when harm is made possible, harm will happen; and that the collateral damage from the harm (especially to innocent third parties) greatly exceeds the effort that could have been taken to avoid it in the first place. > This is your opinion. I think delete-expunge is better as well, but I do not > go as far as to say it is better for EVERYONE. A traditional source of extreme conflict between client developers and server developers in IMAP has been whether the client or the server has control over user interface aspects; and furthermore whether the client can rely upon all servers to operate in a predictable way. You are proposing a major change to the server-end behavior of mailbox semantics based upon an administrative setting which, from the client's perspective, is unilateral and utterly unexpected. > If he insists, I will do it - he's the customer. What happens when your customer finds out that the server does not work with many clients, and the client vendors all say it is because your server is broken? -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
