MBOX-Line: From tony at att.com  Wed Sep  9 20:34:10 2020
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: "HANSEN, TONY L" <tony@att.com>
Date: Wed Sep  9 20:34:43 2020
Subject: [Imap-protocol] Any valid use case for COPY besides moving
 messages?
In-Reply-To: <e4a7a54e-9b62-e245-6aff-9f21697fd03c@thedave.ca>
References: <CAPacwgy_1WJd5TLRDbykTnzfwv9hgcTLzBQZte5=bMRK-RUFLQ@mail.gmail.com>
	<e4a7a54e-9b62-e245-6aff-9f21697fd03c@thedave.ca>
Message-ID: <239E8611-FA90-49DF-BE34-416F60D2172B@att.com>

I'll second what Dave says below.

99% of the time I want move semantics. But then there IS that 1% where I truly do want to make a copy of a message into a second folder, and it had better be a copy and the original had better not get lost from wherever else it might happen to live.

	Tony

?On 9/9/20, 10:46 PM, "Imap-protocol on behalf of Dave Warren" <imap-protocol-bounces@mailman13.u.washington.edu on behalf of dw@thedave.ca> wrote:

    On 2020-09-09 01:27, Andris Reinman wrote:
    > As the subject states, is there actually any valid use case these days 
    > for COPY to just copy messages instead of being a poor substitute for 
    > MOVE (that is COPY+EXPUNGE)?

    The use case is copying a message, rather than moving it.

    I admit many/most users just move messages and in fact some mail 
    interfaces don't have an easy copy button, some omit it completely. If 
    you control the interface and want to drop the copy button, I wouldn't 
    be thrilled but I could accept it. But I believe you're talking about 
    silently and unexpectedly deleting a user's email.

    I will sometimes copy a bunch of messages into a temporary folder for a 
    specific purpose. Perhaps they're related to something I am working on 
    but not part of a single thread (or selected parts of a much larger 
    thread), perhaps they're all requiring action/attention, maybe I'm going 
    to share that folder. But I *always* want the original content sorted in 
    the longterm place they live and I'll nuke that temporary folder once 
    I'm done with it. And admittedly this is not something I do especially 
    frequently either.

    If my messages were silently discarded from their original folder, I 
    would be both logging it as a defect and very quickly switching to a 
    email service that doesn't lose email unexpectedly.

    (Full disclosure: $DAYJOB has a product that only stores a single 
    instance of a message within a mailbox -- But there is no risk because 
    there is no copy action that fails silently, it simply doesn't exist, 
    and nothing other than an obvious "X" delete button will delete a message). 

