[Dovecot] Setting retention policies

[Don Russell]

Bill Cole wrote:
> At 7:24 AM -0700 6/25/07, Don Russell  imposed structure on a stream 
> of electrons, yielding:
>> I access e-mail from different PCs, typically using Thunderbird 
>> e-mail client.
>>
>> Thunderbird has a a "retention policy" it can set on a folder by 
>> folder basis. Policies such as how long to keep messages for, or how 
>> many messages to keep.
>>
>> Is there a way to set those policies on the server itself?
>
> Dovecot itself does not have such a facility, but if you use Maildir 
> it is a fairly straightforward bit of scripting to whack message files 
> greater than a particular age because they are in predictable places 
> and have names starting with their delivery time as a Unix epoch time.

Thanks Bill,

Right now I use mbox format, my last conversion effort to maildir didn't 
go very well to say the least.

Since scripting will be required anyway, I think I'll work on a tool 
that uses the IMAP protocol to accomplish what I want.

Then such a script could be useful regardless of mbox/maildir storage 
methods.

Cheers,
Don