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

http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Expire

But unfortunately you'd have to wait for v1.1 to use it.

is this going to work with all supported mailbox formats ?

Timo Sirainen wrote:

On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 07:24 -0700, Don Russell wrote:

...

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?

http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Expire

But unfortunately you'd have to wait for v1.1 to use it.

Good to know.... and you just added another project to my to-do list: learn how to write a plugin.... :-)

But, I have some other ideas of my own I think I'll pursue.... if I like how it turns out I'll put it "out there" as FOSS. :-)

Chers, Don