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List:       kde-bugs-dist
Subject:    [Bug 72441] Hide Mail and dead.letter
From:       "S.Burmeister" <sven.burmeister () gmx ! net>
Date:       2005-01-21 19:11:36
Message-ID: 20050121191136.8353.qmail () ktown ! kde ! org
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------- Additional Comments From sven.burmeister gmx net  2005-01-21 20:11 -------
> There is an application that does do backups for you already, in the manner
> you request. Its not currently being shipped in the default KDE setup,
> though.

So it should be integrated and the functionality accessible via the same menu 
the import-functionality is accessible. I would even prefer a GUI that 
incorporates all export-functionalities so that the user can easily save and 
migrate all its data (email, bookmarks, passwords, documents, news-feeds, 
addresses, calendar etc.) and config 
(email-identities/transport-methods/filters etc.).

By how much do you think this would ease migration as well as save people from 
losing data?

> Also note that we have had a number of people remove the (K)Mail dir since
> they did not understand that it contained their mail exactly due to the
> point made earlier; they never use the Mail dir themselves.

Certainly there are a bunge of possibilities to delete mail. Yet I still claim 
that those people deleting the Mail-directory are the minority in the group 
of people that lose their email. One might even be tempted to say that a 
person who deletes a directory called Mail would lose its email anyway, so 
the hiding would only pospone the loss.

> In the comments you can find quite a number of ways that the current setup
> can cause the user to loose his email in daily usage.  From using other
> mail clients to people cleaning up their homedir.  If safety comes first;
> these points should not be dismissed because no dedicated backup is in
> place just yet.

So one would have to do a survey to know which method is less safe. Yet that 
would not really help. Although I cannot prove it my thesis is that if one 
looks at the total number of people losing their email-data, the decrease 
because of not deleting it by mistake, would be exceeded by the increase of 
data-loss due to it being hidden and thus forgotten/not known about.
The only thing that really helps, is to provide both mechanisms simultaniously 
in order to avoid the shortcommings of either way to solve this issue.

Remove the data from the space it can easily be deleted, offer a functionality 
that gives the user easy access to migrate and save its data.

> People can still backup their complete homedir, which is still advised
> anyway.

You are right, yet unfortunately unexperienced users hardly read any docs and 
thus do not find any advice. One could even argue that whoever finds that 
kind of advice will have a look at google or the docs before deleting the 
Mail-folder anyway.
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