Hello,

when retrieving emails from my pop3 server I would like to keep my emails on my pop3 mail server for a certain number of days after which they should be deleted automatically.

Is this within the possibilities of pmail?
How do I do?

What you hope for is not easily possible from within Pegasus Mail. One option might be to periodically make an IMAP connection and delete messages through it. I don't use IMAP so am not fully familiar with its capabilities or whether this would be practical. I hope someone else comes along who can speak more knowledgeably about this thought.

At a glance, I don't see a way to achieve this result via POP3. Using IMAP, it's possible, but not automatic.

I would start by creating IMAP access to the email account, which is quite easy, and create an on-open (or on-close) rule for the INBOX folder that would delete read messages over a certain age.

Some email providers, however, can fail to do this. Gmail is known to return an error when a message is deleted via IMAP. The message is deleted, but an error is returned, which interferes with the rule's execution. Other servers (Yahoo, GMX, etc.) work as expected. If you provide more information about your email provider, I might be able to go beyond the assumptions.

mmmh,
I used to configure this on many computers of my friends and relatives at the time when windows xp was around, using outlook express.

it worked flawlessly, regardless of the mail provider.

It looked like this (german version of outlook express)

That capability does not exist in Pegasus Mail.

I thought so, but it seems to be the opposite. In my test, I used a GMX.com account where I needed to disable the "Download only unread mail (i.e, new since the last connection)" directive or the POP3 rule wouldn't work. I entered the following commands into the POP3 rules used on all my accounts:

# Test if message was sent to myaccount and read (i.e. previously downloaded)
If header "T" contains "myaccount@gmx.com" LogicalAnd ""
If not attribute 128 Goto "Aged"
.
. other POP3 rules
.
# Test if message is too old to stay alive
Label "Aged"
If age older than 30 DeleteOnServer ""
Always Exit ""

It worked perfectly. Two messages, one very old and one still aging (both already downloaded), were handled correctly.

euler,
thank you for your efforts and findings!

I am going to look into this in the next days and will report back.