639466 - Automatic archiving as retention policy

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 93094

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Cedric Knight]

Retention policy on IMAP folders and under "Synchronisation & Storage" has options to "Delete messages more than x days old".  What would be much more useful would be an additional policy option to move older messages to the archives for that account. 

Many POP users have traditionally downloaded all email and deleted mail older than a certain timespan from the server, allowing access from multiple devices while keeping within quota for the mailbox or account.  For IMAP users wanting to archive the majority of their mail without sorting it, there is no equivalent facility at the moment, other than manually moving to new folders every so often.

I would suggest modifying the "To recover disc space" dialogues to include an additional checkbox above "Always keep starred messages" called something like "Move expired messages to account archive".

Comment 1

[Matěj Cepl]

This is almost certainly a duplicate of legendary bug 93094.

Comment 3

[Cedric Knight]

Comment: there's a lot of different material in bug 93094 - this enhancement is not a duplicate of the bug as originally described in 2001 or related to most of the comments there, but I think it is fair to say it's a duplicate of Comment 39 by IagoSRL one year ago
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93094#c39> (This again sees the use as principally related to IMAP folders, but it could be useful to limit size of Local folders too.  There are questions about exactly how the enhanced retention dialogue box would function.)

So it would be good if that comment specifically could be assigned or volunteered.