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Thunderbird: Message retention policy not triggering deletion of old messages

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  • Last reply by steeleaguk

steeleaguk
steeleaguk
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I am running Thunderbird 91.7.0 (64-bit) on Windows 11.

I connecting to my mail server via IMAP. The server has no message retention policies. All Email sits on the server until it is removed via Thunderbird.

For Trash, Spam and Sent messages I wanted to enable a message retention policy that would cause these folders to have messages older than 30 day deleted automatically. I want all other folders to retain messages until I manually delete them.

I access the Folder Properties and choose the Retention Policy tab. Here I uncheck Use my Account Settings and select Delete Messages more than 30 days old.

FWIW I have tried the account settings set to both Don't delete any message and Delete all but the most recent 9,000 messages.

So far this has not triggered and the folders are gathering more and more messages.

It is not clear to me how the retention policies are triggered.

Grateful for advice.

I am running Thunderbird 91.7.0 (64-bit) on Windows 11. I connecting to my mail server via IMAP. The server has no message retention policies. All Email sits on the server until it is removed via Thunderbird. For Trash, Spam and Sent messages I wanted to enable a message retention policy that would cause these folders to have messages older than 30 day deleted automatically. I want all other folders to retain messages until I manually delete them. I access the Folder Properties and choose the Retention Policy tab. Here I uncheck Use my Account Settings and select Delete Messages more than 30 days old. FWIW I have tried the account settings set to both Don't delete any message and Delete all but the most recent 9,000 messages. So far this has not triggered and the folders are gathering more and more messages. It is not clear to me how the retention policies are triggered. Grateful for advice.

All Replies (2)

christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
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For Trash, Spam and Sent messages I wanted to enable a message retention policy that would cause these folders to have messages older than 30 day deleted automatically.

I don't know why this wouldn't work for you, so I'm really guessing here. Wrt Trash you can simply right-click Trash - Empty Trash to clean it up initially. As for Spam, you can set it up to delete messages older than 14 days. That's what I do, and it works as expected. There seem to be a lot of messages in your Sent folder. I'd go with the 'older than 30 days' setting and give it some time. May be it just takes a while for the cleanup to be triggered due to the no. of messages in that folder.

steeleaguk
steeleaguk Question owner
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THanks for the reply. Yes, I have been cleaning up manually as it were. In my research I did find an option to tweak the internal settings for Thunderbird and set a preference in the config editor mail.imap.expunge_option to 1 = Auto-expunge messages right away

I'm monitoring. After making the change I was able to compact the folders and the messages that were out of range were removed. I'm monitoring to see how well this works.

In a few days I will unset the preference and see if that makes a difference and report back.

Modified by steeleaguk