Re: Can getmail only poll messages received after some specific date?

Charles,
Very appreciate for your  profesional answer, that give me a clear view of what getmail can capable of.
I'm testing the "retrieve and then remove" method, and see how it works.
If that doesn't work well, I'll try another way.

Best regards.
Joe

 
From: Charles Cazabon
Date: 2022-06-01 22:01
To: getmail
Subject: Re: Re: Can getmail only poll messages received after some specific date?
Joe <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thank you very much,Michael.  That's a good idea for single account.
 
Michael's idea is one I was going to suggest; Gmail, I believe, treats tags on
messages as being IMAP folders, so you can choose to retrieve from a specific
folder that doesn't contain your archival mail.
 
> But  maybe it is not easy for multiple accounts. 
> and using a [date] as a setup parameter may be more flexible.
 
Unfortunately there's no way to implement that reliably.  getmail doesn't know
"the date" of a message -- you can't even really define that.  Does it mean
when the author wrote the message?  Or the value in the Date: header field of
the message?  Or one of the dates in the Received: headers in the message?  Or
when the advertised MX for the domain received it?  Or when the private
internal SMTP destination received it?  Or when it was written into a
recipient's mailstore?  Or when it was first seen by getmail in the IMAP
account?
 
getmail would have to retrieve the message to get the Date: header value
reliably; many IMAP servers can't provide it.  And some messages just won't
have a Date: header field, or will have one that cannot be parsed properly.
 
getmail tracks the age of messages it has retrieved based on the time that it
first saw them, i.e. the time of first retrieval.  This allows it to keep
track of "seen" status (to only retrieve new mail), as well as age of messages
(to implement deleting retrieved messages X days after retrieval).
 
messages only have to be retrieved once, then getmail will never download them
again, if you have read_all set to False.  So another way to accomplish this
is to have getmail retrieve all your messages and write them into a junk
folder that you remove afterwards, then have it go back to fetching only new
messages and writing them to the local maildir.  If you're really so short on
disk space that this isn't practical - mail isn't all that huge - then you can
even use a fake MDA or a filter to just have getmail discard the messages
entirely.
 
Charles
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Charles Cazabon
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