Cleaning out IMAP mailboxes

My mail server has only two mailboxes, In and Sent. I have two folders on each machine, "Old In" and "Old Sent". When I reach my server's quota, I copy all mail up to end of the month before into those two boxes on each machine, then I delete them from the server.

rburke197 wrote:
> Apologies if this is too off-topic. But, speaking of moving from
> Eudora and using IMAP, I made the transition to Apple Mail 8 months
> ago. Now, with MobileMe I'd like to be able to sync my mail to
> multiple Macs, but my other accounts are POP3, which won't sync. Only
> IMAP accounts will sync in MobileMe. Our mail host says they can
> convert our accounts from POP3 to IMAP, but we need to remember to
> clean out the IMAP mailboxes periodically. Does anyone on this list
> know of a method of managing an IMAP account so mailboxes don't fill
> up? Not being too familiar with IMAP, other than that the messages
> remain on the server, unlike POP, I'm assuming there must be tools
> (perhaps in Apple Mail?) to keep one's IMAP house in order. Thanks
> for any suggestions.

Don't know if Mail shows this (I rarely use it) but most email clients have a way to show you the size of each mailbox. What your mail host needs you to do is pick a "main" computer and file things locally there for long term storage. Only keep in your inbox and other "online" IMAP folders what is new or you need to keep around.

David

Can you guys tell me how you remove messages from the server without deleting them locally? I've just switched to IMAP (having inadvertently deleted all my archived emails when I deleted my POP mailbox) and I'm still coming to terms with how it all functions.

In Mail.app, you can select a mailbox in your IMAP account, hit command-I, and get a list of all the mailboxes in your account, the number of messages they contain, their total size, and your overall usage compared to your quota.

I have two strategies for managing my IMAP accounts: (1) in the account with a 150MB quota, I am aggressive about deleting attachments using the Remove Attachments command; I'll download them if I need them before using it. That gets ride of a lot of space. (2) in the account with a several-gigabyte quota, I don't do much, and I move archives from the first account to the second when I need more space in the first.

Note that depending on your account settings, deleted messages may be marked for deletion but not actually purged until you issue the Mailbox > Erase Deleted Messages command (command-K). If you don't regularly purge your deleted messages, your usage can grow very quickly. Unfortunately, Mail.app seems to purge only the open mailbox, not all deleted messages.

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Ben Bathgate wrote:

> Can you guys tell me how you remove messages from the server without
> deleting them locally?

You can't.

The whole point of IMAP is that you have one collection of folders on
the server, and (optionally & ideally invisibly) a local cache of that
set of folders in your mail software.

If you delete a message from one side, it disappears from the other.

You can create local folders and drag messages from the IMAP folder
collection over to the local folders, but this defeats a lot of the
benefit of using IMAP in the first place.

If that's what you want, separate local folders are the way to go.



--
Chris Devers

Mail --> Preference --> Advance --> choose an account --> check "Remove copy from server after retrieving a message:" and pick an option from the scroll down box. I use "when moved from inbox." I also use the command-I option when I get the message regarding full account to remove some or all messages from the server.

On Aug 26, 2008, at 6:48 PM, mperl1 wrote:

> Mail --> Preference --> Advance --> choose an account --> check
> "Remove copy from server after retrieving a message:" and pick an
> option from the scroll down box. I use "when moved from inbox." I
> also use the command-I option when I get the message regarding full
> account to remove some or all messages from the server.

No, that's POP, only..

As Chris said, you can't do this without using a local folder. Just
move the message to a local only folder, and you'll have what you want.