RE: Only download emails older than x days

>> If I was starting afresh it would make sense. Right now I have
>> years of emails I would rather pull down and later on go through them
>> and delete the ones I do not want (as if that is going to happen ;) ).

> I'm not sure I follow.  The use case you describe above is exactly what
> delete_after is designed to support.  Have you looked into this?


I think that I understand what the OP means. The documentation for getmail
configuration states the following:

«
delete_after (integer) — if set, getmail will delete messages this number of
days after first seeing them, if they have been retrieved and delivered.
(...)
»

Note the part "if they have been retrieved and delivered". This means that
delete_after makes sense mostly *if you have already been using getmail*. OP
probably didn't use getmail before and would like to use it now to download
older messages in order to archive them for later review. Thinking about it,
it would be a nice feature to have. Many people have tons of old mail on
their ISP´s and Gmail inboxes and would like to archive the older ones,
leaving room for new mail.