Re: [Fetchmail-users] making fetchmail delete a successfully downloaded email from dovecot

[Lucio C. <lu...@la...>]

On Sun, 11 Oct 2020, Gene Heskett wrote:

>>>>> Shentel.net does not allow fetchmail to delete a downloaded email
>>>>> because their dovecot server handles imap and pop3 from the same
>>>>> directory and somebody might want to come in from imap.

I cannot talk for your provider, but can tell my experience with gsuite 
(gmail) since my institution moved to it.

Before I used to receive e-mail directly on my institute workstation and 
had it filtered via procmail, and read it with alpine (only occasionally I 
activated a local imapd and used a local webalpine web mailer from 
remote).

I wanted to preserve the same, so I run fetchmail every 5 min via crontab 
and get all "good" email from gsuite via pop3.

I choose pop3 because the imap by google is faulty in my opinion, i.e. a 
"delete and expunge" *in its inbox* does not delete messages (it makes 
them disappear from inbox, but they remain in an "All mail" PSEUDOfolder.

pop3 by google is not perfect too but allows a viable workaround. In this 
case stuff got via fetchmail ends in the "Bin" pseudofolder.

>>>> What I would do, is log it to the imap server with any mail client
>>>> (say mutt, Alpine, Thunderbird), select all the messages and
>>>> "click" delete.

This is possible and in fact I have two imap connections to gsuite in my 
alpine .pinerc.

- one goes to gsuite inbox. I use it very seldom (essentially it allows
   me to see mail "transiting" in inbox in the 5 min before it is fetched
   by fetchmail ... used for some "confirmation e-mail")

- the other one is a folder collection and sees all other pseudofolders.
   I check it once per day for the following purposes:

   - to check false positives in the Spam folder (to tag "non spam" I
     have to go the Gsuite webmail)

   - to select all "deleted" messages of the last day in the Bin folder
     and delete-and-expunge them

An account of my tests and setup is in
http://sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/WWW/WhereManWins/gs.html


-- 
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Corti 12 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html