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Evolution not deleting old email from POP server

Asked by David

I am using Evolution 2.22.3.1, which is the latest on Ubuntu Hardy.

On the POP account's Receiving Option tab, under Message Storage, Evolution is set to "Leave Messages On Server" and "Delete after 7 day(s)". However, when I looked at my AT&T/Yahoo! webmail, there were still messages more than 2.5 months old.

I then temporarily setup Microsoft Outlook on my laptop to delete messages after 7 days, and it correctly deleted all messages more than 7 days old on the first connection to the POP server. Therefore, I know that deleting messages is possible.

This looks like an Evolution bug.

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Revision history for this message
Michael Glauche (michael-glauche) said : 		#1

Are they shown as deleted in Evolution ? Did you try the "expurege" function ?

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David (david-kahn) said : 		#2

If you meant the "expunge" function, which permanently removes deleted messages from "~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox (mbox)", the answer is yes.

However, I do not believe that it should be necessary to delete, or delete and expunge, messages from the Evolution In-box for the messages to be deleted from the POP server. Given the low price of disk storage, most users don't delete message from Evolution's local mail box, but still want to delete them from a POP server where they might have a low storage quota. At least that is what most mail clients do.

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C de-Avillez (hggdh2) said : 		#3

Indeed. Expunge will delete the local messages only; your setup should have Evolution automagically deleting messages after 7 days.

This sounds more like a bug... looking up on launchpad, I see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/182799, which matches your scenario. Unfortunately, a fix is not yet packaged for Ubuntu, and it is not yet known if upstream will commit the fix to the stable version (2.22.3.1).

You may want to subscribe to the above bug to be notified of when the fix will be published.

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David (david-kahn) said : 		#4

This bug looks exactly like mine, including the SSL connection, which I didn't realize was important.

Thanks.