[andyc]

Originally Posted by soxfan

1) There doesn't appear to be any way to take this option away from a user. I think in certain cases or environments this would be something that you wouldn't want the user to have control over.

This can be done by overriding the Mail preferences page template in the skin. At the moment, this requires a dev environment in order to compile the template file into native JavaScript and build the skin package. Eventually, we would like to have a skin installer that will do that work for you at installation time.

Originally Posted by soxfan

2) The UI for these settings only allow pre-determined days to be picked via radio buttons. For example, Inbox (Unread), Inbox (Read), and Sent only allow for 30, 45, 60, 90, 120 days or never; and the possible settings for Junk and Trash are 1, 3, 7, and 30 days. Why limit it to just these settings? Why not allow the user to simply enter the number of days they wish to keep the messages?

The exact control used to allow the user to modify this setting is determined by a preference descriptor. By default, this is a radio group with the options you mention. However, the values for the radio group can be changed or the control could be changed entirely -- for example, an input field could be used instead.

The only way to do this, at the moment, is by writing some code. In short, the skin would register a callback to be called when the preferences app is first launched. Then the mail lifetime preference objects can be queried and modified, changing the display options or the input type. Once that is done, the preferences will create the control with the settings you want.

Originally Posted by soxfan

3) It is unclear how these settings interact with the Administrative settings for a user, on the Advanced tab, under Timeout Policy; E-mail message lifetime, Trashed message lifetime, and Spam message lifetime. On the user settings I changed the setting for Junk to 7 days, and this setting is not reflected on the Administrative page. Which setting takes precedence? From an administrative standpoint I think this could get confusing.

The administrator settings take precedence if they are are shorter duration than the user setting. For example, if the admin says that trash is deleted after 7 days, then the user can't set it to be deleted at 30 days, etc. The UI is currently smart enough to disable those options that cannot be set by the user because they would conflict with admin settings.