585054 - Automatic deletion after 30 days of junk mail caused all messages to be deleted

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Penelope Graveyard :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Åke Bertenstam]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; sv-SE; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Eudora OSE 1.0 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100722 Eudora/3.0.4

As of at least Eudora 8.0b8 the setting to automatically delete junk mail after 30 days (under Tools > Account settings > Local folders > Junk) doesn't seem to be working. It worked in earlier betas, I can't tell exactly when it stopped working as I used only a few (1 or 2) of those.
I had hoped that this bug had been corrected in Eudora OSE 1.0, but apparently it hasn't.
I tried to overcome this problem by setting a retention policy of 30 days in the properties for the Junk mail folder earlier this year, unfortunately with catastrophic results as not only was the junk mail folder purged of all mail earlier than 30 days but this setting caused *all* of my mail folders to be purged in a similar fashion. As I hadn't made a backup of my mail for about 3 months I lost a lot of valuable work mail.

I might add that I kept the setting under Account settings so it is possible that there was a clash between the setting under Account settings and the retention policy of the properties of the junk mail folder

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Tick box "Automatically delete junk mail older than [xx] days" (in ools > Account settings > Local folders > Junk settings)
2. Mail is retained in junk mail folder and not deleted after xx days
3.

As for the second solution above, i. e. that of setting the retention policy to delete mail after 30 days in the properties of the junk mail folder I have for obvious reasons not tried to reproduce that.
Actual Results:  
Mail is retained, apparently indefinitely in the junk mail folder.

Expected Results:  
Mails older than 30 days should have been deleted.

If the setting of a retention policy for a specific mail folder still causes *all* mail older than xx days to be lost in Eudora OSE 1.0 (as it did in Eudora 8.0b8) then I think it is a critical error, otherwise a normal one.

Comment 1

[Kalenz]

In my experience, the "delete after XX days" option deletes mail according to the date indicated in the message header, not the actual date of receipt(!).

For example, say we set deletion after 30 days. This means that a spam message dated "01-01-1900" will be deleted immediately (because the software assumes that 30 days have passed), but a spam message dated "01-01-2050" will not be deleted until 31st January 2050. We all know that spam often comes in with false date headers (indeed, spamfilters use this as one of many clues to identify them).

In my opinion, the actual date of receipt (current system time) should be recorded with each message, and only this should be use to determine message age - not message headers.

P.S. Indeed, actual time of receipt may be useful as a column in message views, since sometimes message arrive with wrong dates/times in their headers, or from different time zones etc., so an "older" message may have a more recent timestamp in its header.

Comment 2

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Penelope didn't see any activity in the vcs for the last 8 years, closing.