Global Prune Rules

> I am looking to use this feature and would like some claification please.
> I want to purge all deleted items from all users mailboxes older then 60 days.

> Would I use the folder name "Deleted Items" or the wild card * with a tick box in the "Deleted" options?

It depends...

If you want to delete messages from a folder called 'Deleted Items' then set the folder name to 'Deleted Items', but if you want to delete messages from all folders if they have been marked as deleted, the use '*' and put a tick in the box 'Deleted'

Either option you suggest makes sense. It depends what you want to achieve.

Sorry if this is a bit vague, but it's down to the way IMAP4 deletion works and how different email clients handle it.

At a raw level, if you delete an IMAP4 message, it leaves the message where it is and marks it as deleted. Some email clients will hide these messages, others will display it marked some way - eg with a line through it (some clients can do either, depending on settings)

Because this isn't what users expect, some email clients will mark the message as deleted (and hide it) and put a copy a message into a folder called 'Deleted Items' (or similar) when the user deletes a message. This often matches user expectations better. In this case, the message is actually there twice - once in the original folder, but hidden, and once in the 'Deleted Items' folder. (IMAP4 has a 'COPY' command, but not a 'MOVE' command). The IMAP4 server doesn't treat the 'Deleted Items' folder any differently from any other folder, it's the email client which puts messages there, not the server.


Most email clients can automatically tidy up messages which are marked with the IMAP4 'deleted' flag. How they do this depends on the client - some will do it whenever you leave a folder, others (eg Thunderbird) will do it silently whenever there's a number of deleted messages (in Thunderbird: Options -> Advanced -> Network & Disk Space -> 'Compact all folders when it will save over X MB in total')

So, if you are using Thunderbird with it set to move deleted messages to a 'Deleted Items' folder, then I'd probably leave Thunderbird to clean up the IMAP4 'deleted' messages itself, and just have VPOP3 clean up the 'Deleted Items' folder.