Email, Queue, delete...what?

I have been busy with a challenge I got from a customer and today I was pleasantly suprised that one of the Program Managers replied to a similar question.

Updated: Paragraph 4 24 October 2006

The question that a lot of people have or had including myself is the following:
When an e-mail from a queue is accepted by an user it will move to the “in progress” folder. What should happen when we are done with that email, because there seems to be no way to get the e-mail out of the "in progress folder"? You could delete it, but this also deletes the e-mail from the customer activities history.

The explanation:
When an e-mail from a queue is assigned and is accepted by an user, it moves to the user’s “in progress” folder. The e-mail then stays there forever. This is because an e-mail is already a “closed” activity, that is, there is nothing that the user can do to the particular e-mail itself. Therefore, unlike other queue items (which are automatically removed from the “in progress” folder upon completion) e-mails are never removed from the “in progress” folder.

To remove the email only from the “in progress” folder, you need to select the email (without opening it) from the list of queue items - then delete it. This will only remove the pointer to the email activity itself, and the original email activity will remain in CRM. It will just not appear in the queue anymore.

If you want to delete the e-mail activity from CRM, then you need to open it from the list of e-mails in the queue (by double clicking it, for example) and then deleting it.