Re: [Evolution] Questions on expunging

[Internaut at Large <dkap mailhost haven org>]

Greetings,

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 ...

Actually, I would do it the other way.  Move the younger ones to
"holding" and then, as they age, mark them for deletion.  I'd probably
do it in a coarse grained way.  On, say, Sunday night, first, mark
everything in the 4-week-old folder as trash, do an expunge, then move
everything in the 3-week-old folder to the 4-week old folder, everything
in the 2-week-old folder to the 3-week-old folder, everything in the
1-week-old folder to the 2-week-old folder, and everything in the
current-old folder to the 1-week-old folder, and then do another
expunge.

Also, I'd pin my "trash" to the current-old folder (so when you "delete"
a message, it moves it to the current-old folder. as opposed to simply
marking it as trash).

This would (of course) be made easier if there was some way to make a
button that would move things to specific folders, as opposed to simply
opening up the move dialog box.

Just another suggestion.
-dkap