expunge messages?

[unrzn0]

marking dupes is great, but actually expunging them would be also great. Any hints how to also get rid of messages to free space?

[quentinsf]

Ah, that depends a lot on your mail server and on your mail client - see the first section of the README.

Probably, once IMAPdedup has done its work, you can just open your normal mail client and tidy up your deleted messages.

[unrzn0]

that depends on the client and also some clients only allow that for certain mailboxes. I thought this is a standard IMAP command that could be executed on a mailbox (maybe also in combination with displaying the "to be expunged" messages and a -n option that would do the expunge dry-run)?

[quentinsf]

Ah, you're quite right: there is an EXPUNGE command:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3501#section-6.4.3
I think, when I first wrote this, I probably decided that was too dangerous an operation! And I haven't yet seen an email client that couldn't expunge them for me.

But I'll re-open this issue in case I, or anyone else, gets around to adding an option to do an EXPUNGE on any mailbox with deleted message, and suitable warning in the documentation that you use it at your own risk!

Thanks,
Quentin

[McPringle]

There is a PR for this feature: #80