On Sat, 2010-04-03 at 13:24 -0400, Joseph Brennan wrote: > Nybbles2Byte <nybbles2byte@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Expunge sounds more like a legal term > > than anything to do with software and I'm surprised that it became an > > official > > command as programmers would far more likely think of purge first. > > Perhaps a non-programmer came up with that one. > "Expunge" comes from the MM client developed in the 1970s. One of the > developers, Mark Crispin, designed the IMAP protocol in 1986, and he > carried over the term Expunge as the command to remove messages marked > deleted. > <http://www.columbia.edu/acis/email/mm.home/mmmanual/8.about.mm.html> > I can't think of a good reason not to use the term that the protocol > uses, since it is a word people know and using it would make it simpler > to discuss commands applicable to any IMAP client. > I first saw "purge" used in the mid 1990s. I don't know whether it > first appeared in the Exchange Client (the interoffice memo and > scheduling client that became Outlook) or Netscape Navigator (one > the first GUI IMAP clients). It was an unfamiliar term and I did > not understand why it was being used. None of the old email clients > used it, nor did the POP or IMAP protocols. +1; "Expunge" is the correct term. -- Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> LPIC-1, Novell CLA <http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com> OpenGroupware, Cyrus IMAPd, Postfix, OpenLDAP, Samba ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
