Re: making fetchmail delete a successfully downloaded email from dovecot

On Sunday 11 October 2020 14:24:00 Gene Heskett wrote:

> On Sunday 11 October 2020 13:22:28 Carlos E. R. wrote:
> > On 11/10/2020 18.50, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > > On Sunday 11 October 2020 08:10:37 Carlos E. R. wrote:
> > >> On 11/10/2020 14.03, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > >>> Greetings all;
> > >>>
> > >>> I just spent slightly over an hour deleting old email from my
> > >>> ISP mail server 100 at a time, about 8 months worth and over
> > >>> 30,000 msgs.
> > >>>
> > >>> Shentel.net does not allow fetchmail to delete a downloaded
> > >>> email because their dovecot server handles imap and pop3 from
> > >>> the same directory and somebody might want to come in from imap.
> > >>
> > >> I don't understand this.
> > >>
> > >> What I would do, is log it to the imap server with any mail
> > >> client (say mutt, Alpine, Thunderbird), select all the messages
> > >> and "click" delete.
> > >>
> > >> Surely you can also log to that imap-server using fetchmail, too.
> > >
> > > I don't think it works when coming in thru its pop.isp-name port
> > > 995, Does fetchmail 6.4.8 even speak imap?
> >
> > Certainly fetchmail talks imap. I am on fetchmail-6.3.26 myself, I
> > have been using imap for more than a decade or two. It was some mail
> > servers which did not provide imap, but fetchmail had it as long as
> > I remember.
>
> Ohhkayy, I just made it work, and it fetched everything using imap
> that had accumulated in the last 2 hours. So I used kmails delete dups
> on those.
> from one pass:
> fetchmail: IMAP> A0003 SELECT "INBOX"
> fetchmail: IMAP< * FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Seen \Draft
> $POP3Deleted)
> fetchmail: IMAP< * OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted
> \Seen \Draft $POP3Deleted \*)] Flags permitted.
> fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 EXISTS
> fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 RECENT
> fetchmail: IMAP< * OK [UNSEEN 1] First unseen.
> fetchmail: IMAP< * OK [UIDVALIDITY 1470639859] UIDs valid
> fetchmail: IMAP< * OK [UIDNEXT 242714] Predicted next UID
> fetchmail: IMAP< * OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 427314] Highest
> fetchmail: IMAP< A0003 OK [READ-WRITE] Select completed (0.013 + 0.000
> + 0.012 secs).
> fetchmail: IMAP> A0004 EXPUNGE
> fetchmail: IMAP< A0004 OK Expunge completed (0.001 + 0.000 secs).
>
> was it able to actually delete the one msg it pulled?
> Or am I stuck using a browser to clean it out about weekly?
>
> Thanks.

logging in with a browser answered that question with a resounding yes.
So fetchmail is actually doing what it was told to do for the first time 
in a couple years.  Thank you very much.

> Cheers, Gene Heskett


Cheers, Gene Heskett
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