Your message indicates confusion on multiple points. The following
information ought to clear up your confusion AND answer your questions:
[1] There are three separate operations associated with the removal of a
message:
[a] Marking a message as deleted ("deleting")
[b] Removing deleted messages ("expunging").
[c] Reclaiming the space occupied by expunged messages ("burping").
[2] The [1a] step is reversible; the deleted mark can be cleared and the
message is no longer deleted ("undeleting").
[3] The [1b] step is irreversible by mere mortals (wizards may be able to
use black magic at the cost of damning their souls). The [1b] step also
attempts to perform the [1c] step automatically.
[4] The [1c] step is irreversible. A burp will happen only if this
session has exclusive access to the mailbox. If any other session has the
mailbox open, the burp will not happen.
[5] Re-read [4]. It answers many of your questions.
[6] The "mailutil prune" command accepts IMAP2 style search criteria.
\Deleted is not an IMAP2 style search criterion, although DELETED is.
[7] Some shells interpret "\" as a "quote-next character" operator.
[8] The command
mailutil prune -u haral INBOX \Deleted
is an invalid command. It may coincidentally do the same thing as
mailutil prune -u haral INBOX deleted
does, depending upon the shell that invoked it. Re-read [6] and [7] if
you do not understand the reason why.
[9] [a] There is no such thing as a "Deleted folder" in IMAP.
[b] A mailbox by the name of Deleted has no special meaning in IMAP.
[c] A mailbox by the name of Deleted has no relationship to the
mechanism of message removal discussed in [1].
[c] A mailbox by the name of Deleted has no relationship to the
operation of the "mailutil prune" command
[d] The commands:
mailutil prune -u haral INBOX deleted
mailutil prune -u haral INBOX "before 1-jan-2007"
do not in any way operate on a mailbox named Deleted (or for that
matter any mailbox other than the INBOX mailbox).
[10] The command
mailutil prune -u haral INBOX deleted
does not do what you think it does. It deletes the messages that are
already deleted (hence meaningless). It then attempts an expunge and a
burp.
[11] Presumably, when you refer to "old, invisible" messages, you are
referring to non-burped messages. Re-read everything that I wrote above,
especially [4].
On Mon, 16 Feb 2009, Haral Tsitsivas wrote:
How do I expunge old deleted email? It seems that the mailbox grows and grows
but it no longer contracts (it did so at the beginning, but now the file size
is near 300MB and it never contracts).
I am running imap-2007e on Solaris 2.8, and users are using Thunderbird on
Windows XP and Vista PCs.
When I attempt to expunge using prune, only the current items in the Deleted
folder get removed, not the old, invisible mail messages:
$ mailutil prune -u haral INBOX \Deleted
3 message(s) purged
$ mailutil prune -u haral INBOX "before 1-jan-2007"
No matching messages, so nothing purged
-- Mark --
http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
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