Question about leaving messages on the server

[tomdkat]

Hi! Back in 2018, I switched my mom from AT&T to Comcast for Internet service. At that time, I switched her primary email account from an SBC Global account to a Gmail account. I already had her setup as a Thunderbird user, so I simply added her Gmail account to Thunderbird as an additional email account. I also setup access to her Comcast account's email account, so that could be casually monitored, conveniently.

I have the Comcast account setup as a POP3 account and I have that account setup to leave messages on the server for at most 7 days, or until messages are deleted. This was setup back in 2018. Today, I logged in to her Comcast account online (webmail) and noticed messages in her inbox, dating back to 2018. This surprised me because I figured that mail would or should have been deleted by now.

Question: will the "leave messages on server for at most...." setting cause really old mail, like what I described, to ever be deleted or does that mostly work for newer messages, when Thunderbird downloads them?

My mom is currently running Thunderbird 78.7.1 on Ubuntu 20.04.2 (64-bit).

Thanks in advance!

Peace...

[tanstaafl]

AFAIK checking both "leave messages on server" and "for at most X days" still works as expected for most people.

Thunderbird uses a popstate.dat file to keep track of what messages have been downloaded for the POP account. Each message has a unique id (from the X-UIDL header added by the POP server)

I suspect that if a message isn't mentioned in that file and its not a new message that Thunderbird ignores it. How old is the popstate.dat file in the accounts local directory?

[tomdkat]

I suspect that if a message isn't mentioned in that file and its not a new message that Thunderbird ignores it. How old is the popstate.dat file in the accounts local directory?

Great question! I'll check that out asap.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Peace...