GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 600600
Running Expunge (CTRL-E) when viewing a message in a MAPI folder expunges the entire folder
Last modified: 2009-11-04 13:33:23 UTC
I was looking at a message in my Inbox folder on the Exchange server, using the exchange-mapi backend. I had just that one message selected. I accidentally pressed CTRL-E (normally I don't expunge in Exchange folders because Exchange manages that, or at least it used to with the old OWA backend). Evo thought and chugged and... at the end my Inbox folder was completely empty. Three years and hundreds of "interesting" email all gone. None of those messages appeared in my "Deleted" folder either. Just... gone. Looking at my account with both an Outlook client and the web interface via a browser verifies that those emails are completely deleted. Weirdly, the messages APPEAR to be present in my Evo MAPI folder; looking at the summary window I see all the subjects, etc. just as if they existed... but if I try to view one it gives me an error that the message cannot be retrieved. So it looks like Evo preserved all its own information about the contents of my folder, while expunging with prejudice every trace of every email in the folder on the server. I'm asking the IT guys if they can recover my folder contents, but... not good folks. Very, *very* not good.
Ctrl-E is very dangerous and should be removed IMHO. I have accidentally pressed it myself a couple of times but I got a question before anything happened and pressed cancel. If you didn't get this question you have probably once instructed it to never show that warning again. (Even if it would remove everything I would just restore last nights backup :))
You can't remove expunge from Evo: it's absolutely mandated for IMAP. It's the only way files actually disappear off of the IMAP server; just deleting them doesn't get rid of them, it just marks them as deleted. If you mean, disable it in Exchange because it doesn't make sense there, that's fine with me. In any event, expunge should NEVER delete all the email in the current folder which is not marked as deleted, and not even selected. This is obviously just a horrible, horrible bug.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 573736 ***
Paul, I'm not saying get rid of Expunge. I'm saying get rid of CTRL-E.
I disagree with removing CTRL-E. I use it all the time on my IMAP accounts. I have a simple little three-key sequence when dealing with my spam folder: CTRL-a CTRL-d CTRL-e. If that last step changed to "select Expunge from the menu" it would be a pain. I'm not sure why we're even discussing this change in relation to this bug: even if I had selected Expunge by accident from the menu, or even _on purpose_ from the menu, the current behavior of obliterating everything in your Inbox is simply a bug. We can have a conversation about what the "Expunge" action means in a MAPI account, but no one will suggest that the current behavior is the right behavior--so whether or not CTRL-E exists is irrelevant. Personally I think CTRL-E / Expunge should be a no-op for MAPI accounts, as they have their own way of dealing with the issue (deleting messages from the Deleted folder expunges them). A possible argument can be made that Expunge should delete everything in the "Deleted" folder, but I would definitely disagree with this; it's not expected behavior from those who are familiar with MAPI. If this latter suggestion is adopted anyway, then definitely a dialog should be shown reminding people that this will expunge N mail messages, do you want to continue? Even lookOut! does that much.