Re: [Evolution] Questions on expunging



On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 11:58 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Mon, 2009-02-09 at 19:56 -0800, Ski Kacoroski wrote:
Hi,

Is there any way to set up automated expunging to expunge all deleted
emails that are older than 1 month, 2 months, etc. instead of having it
expunge all deleted emails once a week, once a month, etc.  Usually
after an email has been deleted for a month, I no longer need it, but
now if I set up auto expunge each month, when it runs it expunges all
deleted emails regardless of when they were deleted.

Short answer: not easily.

Longer answer: there are two issues here. Firstly, Evo has no mechanism
for time-based triggers so in any case you'd have to do it via a script
outside of Evo. However this could be done in principle. Perhaps it
could also be done with a plugin, I'm not sure.

More importantly, IMAP Expunge works on an entire folder (or 'mailbox'
in IMAP terminology) at a time. You can't expunge an individual message.
Thus you can't select what to zap and what to leave based only on their
ages. You'd need to sort candidate messages into some special
'death-row' folder and then expunge that. However that actually make the
problem worse, given that IMAP has no 'move' operation. It would have to
copy the message and then delete the original. But that leaves us back
where we started ...

I think MUAs that allow this do it by not following the IMAP deletion
model i.e. they support a physical Trash folder rather than Evo's
virtual Trash. That would make it possible, but at the cost of a fairly
radical change to Evo and a loss of efficiency at the server end.

poc

Patrick,

Thanks for the detailed answer.  So it looks like if I really want this
functionality, I should create a script that does it off line with IMAP
copy and moves.  Ugh!  At least I know why evolution does not support
it.

-- 
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
 connected to the entire universe"            John Muir

Chris "Ski" Kacoroski, kacoroski gmail com, 206-501-9803
or ski98033 on most IM services





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