Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple, iPhone
Our friends over at
Engadget have highlighted a
Cult of Mac post that, at first glance, appears to have found a
bug in Spotlight's caching of email search results on the iPhone. The idea is that after you delete an email from your inbox in the iPhone's Mail.app client, you can still locate and open the e-mail using Spotlight search, if you know the subject of the message.
What's really happening, though, is what Apple might otherwise call "user confusion." When you delete an e-mail message in most mail clients, the message isn't magically deleted, but instead moved to a "trash" or "deleted messages" folder. Being a folder, it is indexed by Mail to provide an unread count, as well as by Spotlight so that you can easily find messages in the folder. When you search for the email, it shows up in Spotlight and opens in Mail because
the message still exists in your trash folder.
All right, so what can you do to avoid this? Well, you need to empty the trash folder from your email. With many providers, you can just go to the trash folder, and delete the message from there to permanently remove it. The problem there is that, if you use a service like
Gmail, the message doesn't really get deleted when you do this because of the way Gmail translates its labels into folders. Gmail's Trash folder is also
set to purge itself after 30 days by default.
tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.tuaw.com/2009/08/18/prevent-spotlight-from-resurrecting-your-deleted-emails/';
tweetmeme_source = 'tuaw';
digg_url = 'http://www.tuaw.com/2009/08/18/prevent-spotlight-from-resurrecting-your-deleted-emails/';
Your options? You either have to use the
Gmail web interface in Safari, or if you don't mind tweaking your Gmail settings, you can enable the
Advanced IMAP Controls Lab and then change your
Gmail settings to immediately delete messages instead of using the trash folder. (Note that if you have your "All Mail" label configured to show up in IMAP, you will need to either disable it, or delete the message from that folder on the iPhone as well. See
this thread for more information.)
By now, you're probably wondering if this is really something to worry about. In my opinion, it really depends on how you manage your email. If you rarely delete messages, or you just delete things that are not of interest to you, they will most likely disappear from your trash folder after a specified time period that is set by your email provider (usually somewhere between 7 and 30 days.) However, if you intentionally delete messages with the idea that the message is unretreivable, then you should probably consider testing this out for yourself to see if it affects you. Again, with many providers, just periodically deleting the contents of the trash folder will do the trick. If you use Gmail, or your company's email services are hosted by
Google, then you may need to log in to the web interface periodically to empty the trash, or you can look into the available configuration options, if you feel comfortable doing so.
So in reality, this isn't really a bug as much as it is what I would call "intended, but unexpected behavior." Many people simply forget that the trash folder exists, particularly on the iPhone where you don't always see it sitting off to the left hand side of your inbox. Checking your trash folder for any unintentionally deleted items, and cleaning out the old messages periodically, isn't really a bad habit to get into. With that said, however, I do think that Apple could improve this behavior by implementing some simple changes like adding an "Empty Trash" button to the trash folder, showing the count of all messages in the trash instead of just unread messages (so that it's easier to notice there are messages in there), and having Spotlight either ignore deleted messages like Leopard's Spotlight does, or at least indicate that they were found in the trash.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you consider this to be a bug, or do you think it's just a place that Apple could improve the experience on? Let us know in the comments!
Prevent Spotlight from resurrecting your deleted emails on iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Prevent Spotlight from resurrecting your deleted emails on iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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