The error says the "message" does not exist, but the message is not the same as the text. The message is an object that can be saved or discarded, and it contains text.
The text still exists and can be copied, but the message is gone and can't be saved anymore.
> We learn a final affordance, which complicates the story. An inexistent message has contents, which may be copied – but only if the message has not yet been discarded.
The message is gone and can't be saved anymore, but it can still be discarded (or presumably not discarded).
If it can show you the content, the container must exist!
Doesn't Outlook rely on the Exchange mailstore?
It's a long time since I was near to Outlook and Exchange, but I thought the Exchange mailstore was some kind of X400 abomination, and that the IMAP capability was a bolt-on.
Like people who’s bodies are gone but who’s souls are still here? I see dead messages… :P
That distinction might be worthwhile, and it’s certainly true from a technical standpoint. But the real problem here is the message is not the same as the message. If that was referring to a single message it’d make a great philosophical problem. Unfortunately we’re just talking about a more boring problem of two different messages with two different texts where the text of one of them accidentally referred to the other one as ‘this’.
if the message stopped existing, but nobody was there, did it make the trash-can sound?
Is the goal to have it be readable to the naked, nominally working human eye? If so then I’d wager you could use magnetic paper as storage if you were a particularly persistent driver developer.
I know the answer for the case where this question refers to something on my pc. I have disabled audio warnings, alerts, etc so if the message stopped existing and I wasn't around to notice then it clearly does not make a trash-can sound.
The physical bits do exist, though, on the storage medium. Now, of course this does not match our usual image of existing, since the bytes were technically always there, but it still exists in the physical world.
You can actually make the same argument with a letter: The paper and ink were there before, the pattern ist what brought it to existence.
The behavior admittedly does not make sense for files (although I suppose you could rename or delete the directory that contains it), but it's sort of unavoidable if you don't want to take locks while some client application you don't control may or may not make changes.