Getting autoexpunge to work

[Philip Colmer]

dovecot 2.2.33.2 (d6601f4ec) on Ubuntu 18.04

The recent announcement that expunge is going to be deprecated and
that autoexpunge should be used instead reminded me that my recent
switch over to autoexpunge is not working.

There has been an active discussion today about getting expunge
working so I thought I'd use the commands suggested there to figure
out why autoexpunge might not be doing anything.

"doveadm search -u local-finance-support mailbox INBOX savedbefore
12w" returns nothing even though the first email for that user is
dated November 12th 2019.

Using the message ID for that first email, I then tried this:

doveadm search -u local-finance-support HEADER MESSAGE-ID
"CAHgKB_f5ttC3kLgxgZiNzwyySvUfb-NXodqZ7K3+dkHKCOUwhg at mail.gmail.com"

f55e9737e270c2564d1a0000e171d23e 37

then

doveadm fetch -u local-finance-support "mailbox date.saved" UID 37

mailbox: INBOX
date.saved: 2020-03-17 14:34:12

Why on earth is dovecot showing today's date for that message? What
have I misunderstood or misconfigured?

Regards

Philip