ietf-mta-filters
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Re: Expiring/deleting old mail

2004-03-17 04:11:20

Message removal at delivery

This approach is easy to understand for users and easy to implement: It
keeps removing mail, starting from the oldest, until the given criteria
are matched.  It could be realised by adding an option to "fileinto"
and probably "keep":

  fileinto :max-days 7 "inbox.mailinglist";
  fileinto :max-messages 100 "inbox.mailinglist";
  fileinto :max-storage 1M "inbox.mailinglist";

It is still open how the last action should behave when delivering
a 2M message.  Perhaps there is a better name instead of "max-".
This mechanism should not be called expiration, because people expect
a different behaviour by that name.

I'm sorry, but these are simply folder-level attributes crammed in at the
message level because that's the mechanism sieve provides. But calling them
message atributes doesn't change their nature.

This last approach does not add message or folder flags in any way.
The previous one did.  This is a modified action, which first cleans up
the folder and then delivers a message to it.

I could imagine to move that functionality into a new action (cleanup?),
but until I see where it could be useful apart from a following fileinto,
I talk about it as fileinto extension.

I'm opposed to all of these approaches and strongly opposed to the last one. 
If
you want to do this, do it right - specify an IMAP extension and then, if it
makes sense, specify a sieve extension that can be used to control the
mechanism.

That makes sense for folder or message attributes.  I don't want
any attributes, because I do not like their overhead.  To answer the
previous asked question of conflicting actions: There are no conflicts.
"max-days 7" followed by a "max-days 6" leaves the last six days mail
in the folder.

Michael


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