Re: The proper way to delete mails?

[hills <hills@users.noreply.github.com>]

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New comment by hills on mblaze repository

https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze/issues/236#issuecomment-1490361071

Comment:
Thanks for such a quick reply.

I don't think my IMAP server automatically does this (though there's a command at my client, alpine, to "purge")

> (modulo usual quoting issues)

I suppose that's another good reason for a dedicated command (could be equivalent of rm or even xargs for mails): ensure one message per-line and have a safety check that the filename (and possibly first block of content) looks like a mail message.

In the spirit of community, shall I see if I can patch the docs so people don't need to ask again.

The existing example:

`mdirs ~/Maildir | xargs minc | mthread | mless`

there's no consideration for pathnames with spaces. So should I just follow in the spirit of it being an example, with a simple xargs again:

`mlist ~/Maildir | mpick -t 'mtime < "-365d"' | xargs rm`

Because the full example gets cluttered and is probably only moving the goalposts:

`mlist ~/Maildir | mpick -t 'mtime < "-365d"' | xargs -d '\n' -r rm