[ale] how do you delete IMAP server messages and not local copies

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Mon, 2011-01-31 at 01:34 -0500, Ron Frazier wrote:
> Hello all.  Several people have been encouraging me to use IMAP for 
> email, and I've been investigating it.  I specifically want to
> download the messages to my local computer and have them available
> whether I'm connected to the internet or not, as well as be able to
> back them up.

Every MUA that I am familiar with has a setting that triggers the
ability to locally synchronize folders when using IMAP.  That will give
you the ability to work offline when desired.

>   I want all my computers synchronized when I'm connected to the net.
> AND, I want to be able to delete the messages from the server
> periodically, when they accumulate to too large a number; while still
> retaining the local copy on my machines.

IMAP gives the ability to synchronize between the client and the server.
To diverge the two (or more) systems defeats the point.

You can archive messages, though, if you want to keep them around for
some reason.  Otherwise, delete them when whatever action they call for
has been performed.  Do, delegate, defer, delete: I truly believe that
you will be very happy when you get into that habit.

>   I cannot seem to find any way to do that based on what I've been
> reading.  Anybody know if that can be done?  I also read that IMAP
> have problems synchronizing thousands of messages in a folder, which
> is routine for me. 

Make it un-routine!

Every time you open a folder in IMAP, the IMAP client has to see if the
folder's contents have changed on the server.  So it will request the
headers for all of the messages in the folder, and compare those to the
ones that it has.  If you're using offline sync, it will then download
the message bodies for all of the messages that it does not yet have,
and add those to the local database.  You can imagine that having very
large folders would be taxing in this situation.

There is no real way to work around it; even Google's servers have
problems with tens of thousands of messages in a single folder.  It can
be very troublesome to work with folders when they get that large, _on a
regular basis_.  What I do is archive everything that I don't delete
(but am finished with).  This lumps them all together in a single
folder, but I don't use IMAP to access that one folder---instead, I use
the Web interface.  It's quite a bit faster.

You could, however, effectively delete messages off of the server by
moving them to a local folder on (one of) your client systems.  However,
you lose the benefits of IMAP synchronization when you do that.

	--- Mike
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