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Panic! 10,000 assorted spam emails just tried to download to my account

Bookman
Grafter
Posts: 269
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎02-08-2007

Re: Panic! 10,000 assorted spam emails just tried to download to my account

Quote from: Barry
Go to "Retention Policy". Set your per-folder retention policy there!

I saw this also under Edit > Account Settings > IMAP Offline and Disc Space so I thought (from the "Offline") that this was for retention on your PC not on the server?
zubel
Community Veteran
Posts: 3,793
Thanks: 4
Registered: ‎08-06-2007

Re: Panic! 10,000 assorted spam emails just tried to download to my account

Quote from: Bookman
Quote from: Barry
Go to "Retention Policy". Set your per-folder retention policy there!

I saw this also under Edit > Account Settings > IMAP Offline and Disc Space so I thought (from the "Offline") that this was for retention on your PC not on the server?

I believe that setting *is* for the local cached copy, and not for the server-side copy.
B.
Bookman
Grafter
Posts: 269
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎02-08-2007

Re: Panic! 10,000 assorted spam emails just tried to download to my account

More problems!
I tried the strategy I outlined earlier. I set Thunderbird to "leave messages on server for at most 1 day". Then connected to PN POP3 server. It said something about login information for about 20 minutes so i assumed it was deleting all the messages older than 1 day.
Then it started trying to download 17,935 messages. So I disconnected, closed TB, opened it again, set the Server settings to "at most 14 days" and tried connecting again. Still it tries to download 17,000 messages!
I've also now changed the TB server settings by unticking "leave messages on server". But then when I connected it started downloading the 17,000 again!
I thought that at least one of these approaches would delete all those messages without me downloading them. Is the only way to get PN to delete all my messages on the server?
pjmarsh
Superuser
Superuser
Posts: 4,030
Thanks: 1,575
Fixes: 20
Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: Panic! 10,000 assorted spam emails just tried to download to my account

The client will download them, then delete them from the server according to what you have asked it to do, ie immediately, after 1 day, after 14 days, never, or whatever else you specify.
As someone said earlier, something like Mailwasher will delete it straight from the server without downloading it.  Also if you connect with imap, it will download the headers only, and you can select them all to be deleted, and will then need to be purged.
Phil

Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.

jelv
Seasoned Hero
Posts: 26,785
Thanks: 971
Fixes: 10
Registered: ‎10-04-2007

Re: Panic! 10,000 assorted spam emails just tried to download to my account

Quote from: Bookman

I thought that at least one of these approaches would delete all those messages without me downloading them. Is the only way to get PN to delete all my messages on the server?

IMAP (or webmail) is definitely going to be your best bet.
If you go to the IMAP folder in Thunderbird, select a load of messages and then hold the shift key down when you hit delete it will completely remove them and not move them to the Deleted folder. After you've deleted messages they will still be found by POP3 until you force the folder to be synchronised (they will initially still be there but marked as deleted - a flag not recognised by POP3) - you can do this by either making Thunderbird go offline or ext and restart Thunderbird.
jelv (a.k.a Spoon Whittler)
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