Claws Mail and Thunderbird both offer the /receive/ parameter "Remove after" X days/hours for POP3 profiles, but not for IMAP. With 95% of the population using mobile phones now, IMAP has a much bigger role than POP3. We need to be able to archive old messages locally while keeping recent messages on the IMAP server. Rationale: 1. Portable devices only need to show recent msgs (e.g. ~30-90 days), not tens of thousands of emails going back many years. 2. For security, and per the "principle of least priviledge" paradigm, it's a bad idea to let service providers sit on an enormous pile of data that can be used against the user by outside attackers and malicious insiders in countless ways. The data on the server at any given moment should be minimized to control the threat magnitude of misuse. 3. Users may have a need to keep an archive of old messages, but they don't generally need their old messages to be reachable from all devices. 4. Many users acknowledge that tech giants (GAFAM/MACFANG) are evil & would prefer not to support them. But that preference is not usually strong enough to drive users off gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc. They don't want the burdon of switching. But minimizing the amount of profitable data sitting on GAFAM servers by archiving can be a trivially simple way to reduce the profits of socially detrimental tech giants. Note that the /Getmail/ mail fetching tool has a delete_after option that works on both POP3 & IMAP. It doesn't solve the problem cleanly though because accessing stored mail from that tool is complex for the user, who still needs to be able to selectively delete a recent message and have that deletion propagate to other IMAP MUAs. The proposed IMAP feature would be more complex than the POP3 variant. When a user orders deletion of a msg, Claws Mail would have to look at the date and determine if it's "recent" (per the user's cutoff time period). If so, it would have to send a delete command to the IMAP server. Every action on an IMAP msg would imply a date check. If Claws Mail were to implement this feature, I beleive it would be a "killer feature" that would draw people to switch to Claws Mail because no other MUA has it.
You can achieve this using Folder Processing rules, which can move, remove, and many other actions.
Someone will be temped to suggest creating both a POP3 profile and an IMAP profile. That hack is problematic for a couple reasons: 1. I've tested it, and it went quite badly (see bug 4419) 2. Even if it works, it messy enough that novice users would suffer with the trip-up of knowing that deletions of recent messages must be done in the IMAP profile, and that recent messages in the POP3 profile do not reflect what the IMAP server shows to their portable devices. 3. Maitaining two profiles is double the configuration effort and user confusion.
thanks for the suggestion Paul.. I'll have a look.
(In reply to juhuseq from comment #2) > Someone will be temped to suggest creating both a POP3 profile and an IMAP > profile. That hack is problematic for a couple reasons: In Claws Mail there are "accounts" and "mailboxes", no "profiles". This is no "hack". > 3. Maitaining two profiles is double the configuration effort and user > confusion. I suppose by "profiles" you mean Accounts. I don't see the problem with "effort" or "confusion", unless the user has a pre-conceived notion that he/she cannot shift.
In the case at hand, I have one account (e.g. bob@danwig1210.me) for which I have 2 different configuration records in Claw Mail (one for pop and one for imap). Describing each of those also as "accounts" is confusing nomenclature b/c they both use the same email account. So I came up with "profile". E.g. "I have one account with two profiles" vs. "I have two accounts for one account"
You say that is confusing, but it's worked for many years. You have 2 accounts in claws-mail: an IMAP account and a POP account. Anyway, this is not a discussion forum, it is a bug tracker. There are places to discuss, the users' mailing list or the IRC channel, see https://www.claws-mail.org/MLs.php for details.