Thanks for answering all my questions.

++jdporter for the sarcasm. And thanks for the prod that quite a while has passed but nothing else has happened on this thread.

<Reveal this spoiler or all in this thread>

One of the nightly cron jobs runs a query like:

update message set folder = folder-1 where -3 < folder and folder < 0;
[download]

and then deletes rows where folder has reached -3 (roughly).

So I think it is actually between 2 and 3 days before a "deleted" message is irretrievable, depending on the time of day when it is "deleted".

You can find -3 hard-coded quite a few places in the other bits of code that deal with "message folders". So we could lengthen the grace period by updating all of those (as well as, I think, just the one instance of "-3" in one cron job).

- tye        

Part of the reason I do so relatively little at PerlMonks now is, in part, due to trying to avoid that much more blame for what I don't manage to do

Ever wonder if your bedside manner could share in the blame? You regularly come across as gruff with shortness in your answers, maybe a simple rephrasing would head off much of that blame? "It is already several days. About 3, as I recall. I don't have the rest of your answers at my fingertips, but poke me a in a few days if no one has expanded on this to see what I can pull up." That extra 30 seconds is all that's required.

And if you are doing so little here, are you at least willing to cede a growing amount of power to others, especially those who may view the monastery differently than you do, to continue maintenance and perhaps growth in new directions? Because you do a lot here, but we don't want the site to die just because you run out of tuits. And no, I don't have any suggestions of who. I have some thoughts as to who not, but that's even less productive, so I will hold them to myself.