Deleting emails on the server

[gioxx]

Hey guys, I must be missing something, but I don't understand where I'm going wrong.
I noticed that, purely by coincidence, some of the email accounts (IMAP) that I back up with Mail Archiver are still taking up quite a bit of server space, even though the emails in them have long since exceeded the 30-day limit I set for automatic deletion:

I have emails dating back to June 2025. I checked a sample of the emails, and they’re all backed up correctly, so I’m wondering what else is missing that would cause them to be deleted via IMAP, keeping only the emails from the past 30 days or fewer, as I specified in my account settings.

Can anyone tell me what I need to check and/or change?

Thanks!

[s1t5]

Hi!
Please ensure that IMAP EXPUNGE is appropriately supported by your mail server/provider. This is not the case for Gmail by default for example. More details here: https://github.com/s1t5/mail-archiver/blob/main/doc/RetentionPolicies.md#requirements

[gioxx]

Right, I hadn't thought of that at all. In this specific case, I'm not working on Gmail but on another provider that might not actually support it.
No big deal—I’ll just have to run one of my Docker containers that already handles email cleanup 😄