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23,375 messages in the trash
#1
i am on Tiger with Mail 2.1.3 and this problem has been vexing me for years. how the heck do you permanently, selectively delete/erase messages in the Trash?

i prefer to keep messages in the trash for at least 6 months back. this protocol has saved my butt more than once. the prefs in mail are set to Never for permanently erasing because the only other options, one week/one month are too short a time frame for me. yet, i can seem to get rid of the emails once i attempt housecleaning. i have two email accounts so each has a trash folder plus the On My Mac folder. In one email account, I'll select a bunch of emails, delete them and they'll seem to be gone. But if i check in the On My Mac folder - there they still are. And when I go back to the trash of that account's folder, they are back again.

i want to permanently erase emails older than 6 months like you can get rid of the junk mail. HELP! there is probably a really simple solution to this but i just can't see it. and yes, i looked in help.
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#2
make a pre-trash folder... make a rule for that folder to get get rid of 6-month-old mail.
Once you empty the real trash, thrash is gone...
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#3
Set up a Smart Folder for Mail that is 6 months old or older. Delete that as you wish, but keep the Trash for trash, and empty it.

This will not remove the email from the Inbox, but you will have to live with that. The Trash is for email you no longer want. Period. It is not a temporary storage bin.
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#4
rich in distress wrote:
make a pre-trash folder... make a rule for that folder to get get rid of 6-month-old mail.
Once you empty the real trash, thrash is gone...

this is akin to a solution i hobbled together after making the post. i have a Mail enhancement called Mail Act that lets you set up keystrokes to invoke rules. i created a folder called Holding Tank and now most new emails that i would normally delete will have a shortcut to get them into that folder. i'm in the process of moving the last 6 months into the holding tank. then i can finally empty the trash! though it's a tad more work than Apple simply giving a customizable option for erasure, it will allow me to send emails like forum thread notices to the trash right away and erase them. a tidier house overall.
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#5
You could opt to use a real mail client.

In Entourage, I just set a schedule to periodically delete items in the trash older than (in my case) two weeks.

Thunderbird has a similar ability with a "retention policy" that can be set on the trash folder.
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#6
ahhh! so much better! with 1300 messages in the Holding Tank we're down to 1,921 messages in the trash and i've regained over 2.5 GB of hard drive space. whew!
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#7
Doc wrote:
You could opt to use a real mail client. In Entourage, I just set a schedule to periodically delete items in the trash older than (in my case) two weeks.

I tried a real email client once. Twelve minutes after the automatic scheduled emptying, I realized I needed one of those deleted messages. It was tragic.
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#8
Article Accelerator wrote:
[quote=Doc]
You could opt to use a real mail client. In Entourage, I just set a schedule to periodically delete items in the trash older than (in my case) two weeks.

I tried a real email client once. Twelve minutes after the automatic scheduled emptying, I realized I needed one of those deleted messages. It was tragic.
In the default configuration in both apps, you should get an alert before the messages are deleted. If you disabled the alert or clicked to dismiss it, that's your own fault.

Also, in Thunderbird deleted mail remains in the database until the db is optimized/compressed. There are plugins for it that take advantage of this to allow the user to recover deleted mail.
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#9
Doc wrote:
Also, in Thunderbird deleted mail remains in the database until the db is optimized/compressed. There are plugins for it that take advantage of this to allow the user to recover deleted mail.

So in real e-mail clients, empty doesn't mean empty?

(Yeah, don't bother responding--your definition of "real" and mine apparently don't coincide...)
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#10
> your definition of "real" and mine apparently don't coincide...

Not if you trust Apple's Mail.app.

No.
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