[Users] [Bug 4420] New: (feature request) add the POP3 "Remove after" feature to IMAP

[noreply at thewildbeast.co.uk]

https://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/claws-mail/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4420

            Bug ID: 4420
           Summary: (feature request) add the POP3 "Remove after" feature
                    to IMAP
           Product: Claws Mail
           Version: 3.17.3
          Hardware: PC
                OS: Linux
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P3
         Component: Folders/IMAP
          Assignee: users at lists.claws-mail.org
          Reporter: juhuseq at boximail.com

Claws Mail and Thunderbird both offer the /receive/ parameter "Remove after" X
days/hours for POP3 profiles, but not for IMAP.  With 95% of the population
using mobile phones now, IMAP has a much bigger role than POP3.  We need to be
able to archive old messages locally while keeping recent messages on the IMAP
server.  Rationale:

1. Portable devices only need to show recent msgs (e.g. ~30-90 days), not tens
of thousands of emails going back many years.

2. For security, and per the "principle of least priviledge" paradigm, it's a
bad idea to let service providers sit on an enormous pile of data that can be
used against the user by outside attackers and malicious insiders in countless
ways.  The data on the server at any given moment should be minimized to
control the threat magnitude of misuse.

3. Users may have a need to keep an archive of old messages, but they don't
generally need their old messages to be reachable from all devices.

4. Many users acknowledge that tech giants (GAFAM/MACFANG) are evil & would
prefer not to support them.  But that preference is not usually strong enough
to drive users off gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc.  They don't want the burdon of
switching.  But minimizing the amount of profitable data sitting on GAFAM
servers by archiving can be a trivially simple way to reduce the profits of
socially detrimental tech giants.

Note that the /Getmail/ mail fetching tool has a delete_after option that works
on both POP3 & IMAP.  It doesn't solve the problem cleanly though because
accessing stored mail from that tool is complex for the user, who still needs
to be able to selectively delete a recent message and have that deletion
propagate to other IMAP MUAs.

The proposed IMAP feature would be more complex than the POP3 variant.  When a
user orders deletion of a msg, Claws Mail would have to look at the date and
determine if it's "recent" (per the user's cutoff time period).  If so, it
would have to send a delete command to the IMAP server.  Every action on an
IMAP msg would imply a date check.

If Claws Mail were to implement this feature, I beleive it would be a "killer
feature" that would draw people to switch to Claws Mail because no other MUA
has it.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.