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Retain sent Mail messages for a specific number of days Apps
My IMAP Sent Messages folder in Mail got pretty full once, so I turned on "Delete messages older than one month" in the Preferences -> Accounts -> Special Mailboxes pane. Of course, today I needed something from a couple of months ago.

You can compromise between deleting messages older than one month and never by editing com.apple.mail.plist in your ~/Library -> Preferences folder. Using the Property List Editor (double-click on the property list file), look under Mail Accounts for NumberofDaystoKeepSentMessages, and change it to the number of days you want-- I chose 90. You can also change the values for your Junk Mail and Deleted Messages folders, too.
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Retain sent Mail messages for a specific number of days | 2 comments | Create New Account
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Retain sent Mail messages for a specific number of days
Authored by: bhippel on Aug 15, '03 01:15:45PM

Of course, you could always set up a reminder (or a smart script dude can come up with a script to do this) to archive mail from IMAP boxes to a local file on your Mac. I have a reminder that pops up once a month in iCal that reminds me to manually move messages (both in and outboxes) out of my IMAP (.mac) box and into an archive. It's never gotten full that way.



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Retain sent Mail messages for a specific number of days
Authored by: wsdr on Aug 15, '03 01:52:53PM

I took this one step further and edited the actual preferences screen using Interface Builder (part of developer tools). I made a copy of Mail and went and found the correct screen, added a new item to the relevant pull down menu (menus in my case). The value associated with those particular preferences are expressed in number of days-- I wanted six months, so put in 180 days as the value.

After editing Mail, I went into the prefs and there were my new values-- I changed them, looked in the prefs file and sure enough, the new values were there. And Mail obeys them.

Why do this instead of the other? If you edit the prefs file directly, any time you edit the preferences for the account using Mails interface, you will find that the values may change.

Of course, this won't survive an update.

I use this for Trash and Sent mail. Works great.



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