Hi all, I've accumulated many messages in my mailbox going back to 2005. I've always had the same problem, pruning the mailbox of old messages to keep a manageable size. I know i can create new mailboxes and painfully copy mesages, but this is really waht i wanted to work but didn'T:

1. Search for all messages in the date range 2005 to 1017 .. it did that.
2. Highlight all messages found. It did that.
3. Delete all highlighted messages.

It appeared to do (3) but when I searched again, the same old messages were found and the MAIL folder didn't decrease in size. I also expected and didn't see the pmail housekeeping message to re-compress the mail folder which i expected for such a large delete.

help, what am I doing wrong, are the old mail messages write protected or incompatible with latest release of pmail?

Thanks

It appears you can go to an individual mail folder and delete old messages from within it. But if you search for the occurence of messages within a date range across all mail folders, then highlight those results found, they are not deleted? I think this may be why in the past I've never solved this problem of bloated mailboxes.

What am i doing wrong to delete messages across all my mailboxes meeting my search criteria?

If you are using search, that creates a linked folder to the messages, and deleting the links does nothing to the original messages.

You want to use the message select option to select the messages older than number of days you want. So assume you want mesages before 2017 (1017 in your message?).
So would be older than 2090 (365*6 days). Then select and then delete.

This would need to be done with each folder.

I generally have folders sorted by date newest to oldest.
Go to end and click on oldest message. Then scroll up to messages to find point I want to delete to then to Ctrl-Click. That selects and then delete.

Would make sure to make a backup before doing any deleting just to be sure.
Don't know how many folders you have, but would probable just do the largest ones.

Thanks. Yes I backup MAIL & Programs before pruning.

This would need to be done with each folder.

That's my problem. Working within Windows it's normal habit to be able to highlight and delete. But you've explained that pmail find only creates links to messages and even though Delete is still an option, it's only deleting the links not the actual messages.

I think this is the problem I've always had that pmail doesn't understand you need to manage mail folders and delete them either to prune the file size or for security reasons. The latter is becoming more necessary. So I'm back to what I've always found with pmail that creating a folder structure and adding messages is easy, but cleaning up a lot of historical mail and folders by deletion isn't. Pmail deletion is quite fast so I suspect it isn't secure delete and remnants of mail messages will be scattered over my hard drive?

Yes I've just spent an hour going through about 100 folders and deleting old mail as you suggested, but didn't expect to do it that way when the convention for Windows file management is highlight and delete.

Thanks for your reply.

You could probable create a general mail filtering rule.
Tools / Mail Filter Rules / create edit general rule set.

Then add rule

Created a test rule
cat OLDMAIL.PMC
oldmail
If date between 2190 and 99999 Delete ""

Then would have to apply the rule to each folder, but would probable be faster than doing whole process one by one.

Did not test it. But assume it would work. Has a range option as well, but only seems to take 2 digit year? So, would definitely want to test that option..

I'd more likely create a directory to move messages to rather than delete, and then check that folder for messages before the final delete.

Did a test and that rule didn't work as it was written. With the 99999 it actually did nothing.
Changed the rule to use 9999 and then thr rule did delete messages.

Had a copy of my Amazon folder that had messages going from recent to 2010 that had over 2000 messages in it. Applied the rule with the 2190 to 9999 and it deleted all but 649 messages going back to Oct 25 2017 being the oldest message.

There seems to be a option to apply general rule to selection but on mine it is greyed out?

So, looks like that option would have been faster...

I had a copy in a test admin folder, so did a quick test.

Additional option.

Noticed there is a Message Date and Message Age option.
The first one looks for a range of days then second one is if older than days.

Create another rule
2017rule
If age absolute older than 180101000000 Delete ""

and it deleted all message before 2018/01/01

That would seem a little cleaner..

I think you hit the nail on the head earlier when you said Find only produced a window of links, so search is misleading and that's not what I'm used to in a Windows environment where search= find something= do something with the result = Delete/copy/or paste whereas pmail gives you a blank screen leaving mail still there. In human machine interaction we talk about cognitive behaviour. Putting it simply, if you give a human software or hardware to drive they have pre-learned certain things and will initially do what they have learned. The best machines and software don't need to teach people how to use or not use it! I can't believe pmail has been around as long as my oldest mail messages and I still can't easily clean up the folders. I've noticed that pmail is setting a write protect flag which comes back if you try to remove it. Maybe your link suggestion is actually pmail can't delete from Find, because folders are set as read only?

I'll try your rule suggestion, but this seems a work around for a fundamental problem? Presumably rule scripts aren't treated like 'Find'? Thanks for your help.

There's a setting on Tools > Options > Folder behaviours called Deleting a link from a Link Folder also deletes the original message ...:

Michael, you got the answer! msetzerii was right about pmail producing links using Find to search on date ranges. But those options in Folder behaviour I suspect remove the write protect flags and yes you can highlight all the files found across many folders then actually delete them (after you made a backup!).

What's needed is a warning popup if you try to delete Find results when those options aren't enabled, to warn you nothing has happened or just don't clear the results from the find window?

Once you tick the boxes, highlight and mark the Find results you get a warning popup defaulting to delete each individual message, but you can cancel that. After the block delete, you see the pmail compressing window which is re-assuring the delete actually happened.

Many thanks to both. I hope this discussion and your contribution helps others.

It shows me this message if I delete messages from a search folder.
I'd assume that at some point you must have clicked on the Do not show me this warning in future, and that is why you didn't see it.

I don't turn it off, and would never want to set the option to delete the original message. Be scared that would delete something I don't want.

Also, shows a different message about deleting search folders that it only deletes links, and does nothing to the messages in original locations.

Like the rule method, since one has to directly apply them to the folders.