Haravikk:

So I have a script for handling my specific archive and expunge
needs, but it’d be nice to be able to track how many messages are
being affected.

Currently I’m doing it by firing the same search queries into
doveadm search and counting the lines of the result with wc -l, but
that’s not a very pretty solution. While I’m mostly doing it out of
interest on a personal server, I can’t imagine it’s a very scalable
way to do it if you wanted to gather some kind of metrics for example.

What I think would make sense would be for relevant doveadm commands
such as move, expunge (probably purge too) and others I haven’t
thought of to have a new option that, if enabled, will cause the
command to output the number of messages affected as the final line
of output (most of these commands don’t have any output anyway). A
doveadm count command could also be a convenient, more efficient,
alternative to doveadm search | wc -l.

+1 statistics are always nice

Andreas