IMAPCleanse

Rubyforge Project:

Documentation:

seattlerb.rubyforge.org/IMAPCleanse/

About

IMAPCleanse removes old, read, unflagged messages from your IMAP mailboxes.

Why?

I’m lazy. I don’t delete read messages from my mailboxes because I like to have context when reading threads. Since I’m lazy my more-trafficed mailboxes can end up with tens of thousands of read messages. Deleting this many messages with Mail.app is time consuming and boring.

So I wrote IMAPCleanse to clean out my old mailboxes for me. If I want to keep a message around for forever I’ll just flag it and IMAPCleanse won’t touch it.

Installing IMAPCleanse

Just install the gem:

$ sudo gem install IMAPCleanse

Using IMAPCleanse

In short:

imap_cleanse -H mail.example.com -p mypassword -b Lists/FreeBSD/current,Lists/Ruby -a 30

The help for IMAPCleanse should be sufficiently verbose, but here’s a couple of tips:

–noop and –verbose

The –noop flag tells IMAPCleanse not to delete anything. When combined with the –verbose flag you can see how many messages IMAPCleanse would have deleted from which mailboxes.

$ ruby -Ilib bin/imap_cleanse -nv
# Connected to mail.example.com:993
# Logged in as drbrain
# Cleansing read, unflagged messages older than 26-Feb-2006 17:04 PST
# Found 23 mailboxes to cleanse:
#       mail/Lists/FreeBSD/current
[...]
#       mail/Lists/Ruby/ZineBoard
# Selected mail/Lists/FreeBSD/current
# Scanning for messages
# Found 0 messages
[...]
# Selected mail/Lists/Ruby/ZineBoard
# Scanning for messages
# Found 0 messages
# Done. Found 0 messages in 23 mailboxes

(Since I just ran IMAPCleanse it didn’t have anything to do.)

~/.imap_cleanse

The ~/.imap_cleanse file can hold your password and other options so you don’t have to type them in on the command line every time. The format is simple, just the options file name followed by ‘=’ followed by the argument.

No whitespace is stripped from options, so be sure to do that yourself. Mine looks something like this:

Host=mail.example.com
SSL=true
Username=drbrain
Boxes=Lists/FreeBSD/current,Lists/FreeBSD/performance,Lists/FreeBSD/Soekris,Lists/FreeBSD/stable,Lists/Ruby
Age=30
Password=my password