I have a folder of promotional emails which I look at from time if I need some service parts for the car or a new cartridge for the printer because sometimes there are sales or discounts worth taking advantage of. In Thunderbird I set the retention policy to delete messages more than 30 days old, because obviously these offers expire after some time.
I checked the folder recently and found that all my emails were still there.
After quite a bit of checking and searching, I found that you have to run File/Compact Folders to make the policy active for the first time.
A feature not a bug, apparently.
I entirely agree with Mike A. Harris' comment on the bug report.
I chose "File->Compact Folders" in 2.0.0.21 and it does not seem to work, however if I right click directly on the folder with a retention policy and choose the "Compact" option, it causes the folder to flush mail older than the retention timeframe. I'm not sure if thunderbird will auto-flush mail in that folder afterward or not, or if you have to constantly manually choose "compact".
Personally, I still consider this a bug because the majority of users who choose to set a retention policy of n days are neither informed that, nor are they likely to guess that they have to perform another action like "compact". So if it isn't considered a bug per se. then it definitely is a design flaw. Having said that, it probably belongs in the upstream bugzilla I guess.
Hopefully thunderbird 3 has a more intuitive design that works like one would expect. :)
I checked my promotions folder again today, and it seems the retention policy is now in force, as emails older that 30 days have been deleted. As Mike pointed out, you need to right click the folder and choose the Compact option for the policy to work.
No comments:
Post a Comment