URLs and side effects (Django)
I don't think there's anything wrong with either option, but #2 is potentially better from a performance standpoint. After the action is posted you can render the inbox without a redirect, so it cuts down on the HTTP traffic.
I'm wondering if it's considered okay (particularly, in Django) to have a URL that's only intended for actions with side effects, that's only intended to be accessed by POST, and that is basically invisible to the user. Let's say, for the sake of making this concrete, I have a little messaging system on my site, and from their inbox, a user should be able to do a bunch of things like:

Delete a message
Mark a message as read
Report a message as spam

With all of those things causing a page refresh, but leading back to the same page. I'm wondering how to design my URLs and views around this. I see (at least) two options, and I have no idea which is more idiomatic.
Option 1)
Have a separate URL and view for each action. So, /inbox/delete-message/ maps to views.delete_message, and so on. At the end of each of those views, it redirects back to /inbox/.
I like the way things are clearly separated with this option. If a user somehow finds themselves sending a GET request to /inbox/delete-message/, that presents a sort of weird situation though (do I throw up an error page? silently redirect them?).
Option 2)
Use the same URL and view for each action, and have a POST parameter that identifies the action. So I would have one rather long inbox view, which would have a bunch of if statements testing whether request.POST['action'] == 'delete', or request.POST['delete'] == 'true' or whatever.
This option feels less clean to me, but I also feel like it's more common.
Which would be preferred by Djangonauts? Or is there another option that's better than either of the above?