Let’s say you have this IOT device like a motion detection camera. Which sends you emails. Emails you keep in a separate IMAP mailbox. Lots of emails. So you want to delete those emails in some automated fashion, because doing that daily is oh so boring (remember, lots of emails).
Wouldn’t it be great if there was like some handy command line tool that would delete the oldest emails and keep like a 1.000 or 500 of them only? Well yes, that way I could script that annoying job and run it daily.
I didn’t find something that already did this. So I figured I’d be able to whip something up in an hour or so using PowerShell, or maybe a small .NET console application using an existing IMAP library.
Well, 3 different IMAP libraries and about 4 hours later I did have something rudimentary that finally did what it was supposed to do. Delete the oldest email, and leave the most recent 1000 (or whatever number you want) behind. That took longer than expected, so to regain as much time spent on this as possible I threw the ImapCleanup tool on GitHub, including binary downloads. I hope someone else will find this useful as well.
Beware though. This tool deletes emails. Be careful which mailbox you point this at, and make sure you test it in advance on a dummy mailbox. Maybe your email server behaves differently than mine, and important emails get digitally shredded by mistake.
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