4. A Serious Problem, Continued

Most of this behavior is perfectly normal under the IMAP protocol. Deleted messages are marked for deletion, but not deleted from the client or server Inbox until a command to purge deleted messages is issued by an IMAP client. Client-server Inbox folder synchronization is also part of the IMAP protocol. It is also normal under the IMAP protocol for a copy of a deleted message to be placed in the client’s Trash folder and for client Trash folder contents to be synchronized to the user’s IMAP server-based Trash folder. Once messages are purged from the client, the server is synchronized with the client Inbox and everything looks normal - deleted messages no longer show up in the client or server Inbox and there is a copy of the deleted message in the client and server Trash folders.

What is not normal under the IMAP protocol is for deleted messages to be hidden on a client and for there to be no apparent way to actually delete messages marked for deletion. This is the problem on the iPhone.

Some have claimed that setting the time for removal of deleted items from Never on the iPhone to some interval such as the 1 day minimum, causes messages marked for deletion to be purged from client folders and through synchronization from server folders. This has yet to work for me or for many others who have tried it. And, if it did, 1 day would be too long a period. Try 10 minutes. Some have hypothesized that this parameter might apply to automatically emptying the Trash folder, not to purging messages marked for deletion, though many have reported that this doesn’t work reliably either.

I’m still evaluating the time for removal option on the iPhone, but I’m not too confident that it will work or that it is intended for purging messages marked for deletion. I’ll let you know how things go.

Let’s look at all of this in a bit more detail. In the screen capture above the two messages after the first unread Weather Channel message are marked for deletion in the Outlook 2003 implementation of the IMAP client. Clicking the Edit menu at the top of the Outlook window and selecting "Purge Deleted Messages" removes the messages from the IMAP view of the Inbox, leaving only the copy of the messages in the Deleted Items folder (Outlook’s equivalent of the Trash folder). I assume that this also leads the iPhone IMAP client to delete its hidden messages.

Given that I can’t seem to purge messages marked for deletion using my iPhone, my current solution is to run an IMAP client in Outlook and to purge the messages there.

The IMAP client connects to my Exchange server email. I also connect directly to the Exchange server using MAPI protocols, so I have two instances of an Exchange connection in Outlook. Once I purge the messages in the IMAP connection, the messages are also removed from my direct connection to Exchange.

What a bloomin’ mess. Hey, Apple, we need easy and direct IMAP message purging on the iPhone. Someone has developed a little purging service that runs on an Exchange server to automatically purge messages through the Exchange Server IMAP server service. This could certainly be easily done with any IMAP server. I haven’t yet gotten hold of it or tested the Exchange server version. It should be easy to do a version that runs on most popular operating systems against virtually any IMAP server. Until we have a solid IMAP client for the iPhone, Apple should make such services available for Exchange 2000 - 2007 and at least an example version for non-Exchange IMAP server implementations.