Yesterday, my fiancee received a bunch of emails, each one had attached at least two digital photographs — her class had a party the other day. As a consequence the limited quota of university web-mail (50MB) was exceeded! Where is the problem, you may wonder?

After saving all the photographs on her disk, she tried to delete all those emails. But unfortunately her intentions came to a halt, when she received this unfriendly message:

ERROR: Could not complete request.
Query: COPY 410 “Trash”
Reason Given: UID COPY failed: Message copy failed: Disk quota exceeded

She did not give attention to the error message and tried to delete one by one, but the message kept showing up. That is when we decided to have a look at the message, understand what went wrong and attempt to fix things. After ten minutes of fighting and digging into available options, we did it! We were heroes

But why did she skip the message in the first place? Why ten minutes were required by two students (with computer science background) to solve this problem? There are a lot of things going wrong with that message…

First of all, the given reason for the failure is placed at the bottom of the message! In such cases, users scan for useful and helpful information and it should be placed on the top; they do not care about the type of error or what query was attempted to be executed. Well, that kind of information might be helpful for developers, but definitely they have no meaning for the eventual users.

Secondly, the given reason states that the copy failed due to the fact that the disk quota exceeded. Wait a minute … she did not attempt to copy, but to delete those messages. Did she do something wrong? No, definitely no! The query indicates that a copy to the trash folder were attempted and failed. Hmm, here is the scenario: message is copied from inbox to trash, before gets deleted. Even in that case, messages in the trash should not count towards the quote limit!

To conclude, in order to find a workaround for this problem, you should firstly understand the developer model and later on use your fantasy to identify the right option. Obviously, that error message could be replaced by a more friendly and helpful one, like the following:

A copy of this message will not be kept in trash folder and it will be deleted permanently. Whould you like to proceed? Yes - No

Or at least something like that (this one reminds me of Windows error messages)

Deletion of message failed. Please uncheck the “Use trash” option and try again.