This thread discussed the need for the permission, but it was dismissed as irrelevant since “nobody would resign from authenticating because of this” and “this would only affect less tech-savvy users”. Well I just resigned…
I consider myself somewhat tech savvy, and “permanently delete all email” still sounds ominous to me. Can you explain why this is needed? I am fine with not being able to delete messages when refusing that particular permission, unless its irreversibly tied to reading and writing?
As far as i know, Googles does not have a special permission “Delete All Messages”. There is just a general permission to “Delete Messages”:
in case of Delta Chat, this permission is needed to delete (single) messages after explicit user requests. not more, not less.
This is not different to any IMAP connection.
Google, however, draws a little different picture in the permission dialog, which is technically correct, however. At the end, you have decide whether you trust the app or not.
Also, the permission is not requested on app-runtime, but before, for all installations. so, there is not really a way to make this permission optional. and not requesting the permission would remove the ability to delete any single message (maybe even more, i am not that deep in that topic currently, and things always change moreover
Sure. I don’t think deleting single messages is an essential feature, so if there would be a way to just build an alternative version of the app that does not require this permission, that would be pretty cool. Anyway thank you for the explanation. I might dig into this at a later time, unless of course someone has a pointer as to where to look to disable this permission request / capability…
@mgielda I don’t see why would be useful to have an email client without that permission, it would be quite inconvenient ex. for ephemeral messages, or if user actually wants to delete a message, the app is open source, if you don’t trust it why to even install it then? it also requests file permission, could delete some files from your file system, record audio, etc.
btw doesn’t gmail always move messages to trash when an app tries to delete it?
