Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the server which
are older than a certain date?

A customer of mine uses MS Outlook 2016 to read POP mail from his
yahoo.co.uk mailbox. Because of Yahoo's change in policy about passwords
(Yahoo's POP server now needs a machine-generated password rather than the
account password which he has set up), he's not been receiving any mail
since January - he's been relying on Yahoo's webmail interface.

I've resolved the password issue and Outlook appears to be able to establish
a POP dialogue with the server: I can see it listing the number of messages
and the collective size of them all, as well as listing the ID numbers of
them all. But it stalls at "comparing blobs" which I presume is comparing
the checksum of each message on the server to see if Outlook already has it.

But there is a problem. His Outlook has been set to leave a copy of all
messages on the server - not to delete old ones n days after I was
downloaded. And so his account has 260,000 messages and 33 GB (yes, I had to
count the digits several times to make sure!) of data.

That's a hell of a lot of messages...

Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the server which
are older than a certain date - eg the date of the last message in January
that he successfully received into Outlook? He's reluctant to delete
everything, right up to the present date, because he's like a copy of the
January-to-now messages for his records.

How does Outlook process the "leave a copy of messages on the server" and
"delete older than 30 days" combination? Does it do that deletion first, or
only after it has finished synchronising all the messages between server and
client? In other words, is it worth me cancelling the "get new messages",
setting "delete after n days" and then restarting? It's been working away
(with debugging turned off again now it's proved that it's started the POP
conversation) for about 18 hours with no visible effect, so I presume it
hasn't got to the new messages yet to start them appearing one by one in the
Inbox.

NY wrote:
> Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the server
> which are older than a certain date?
>
>
>
> A customer of mine uses MS Outlook 2016 to read POP mail from his
> yahoo.co.uk mailbox. Because of Yahoo's change in policy about passwords
> (Yahoo's POP server now needs a machine-generated password rather than
> the account password which he has set up), he's not been receiving any
> mail since January - he's been relying on Yahoo's webmail interface.
>
> I've resolved the password issue and Outlook appears to be able to
> establish a POP dialogue with the server: I can see it listing the
> number of messages and the collective size of them all, as well as
> listing the ID numbers of them all. But it stalls at "comparing blobs"
> which I presume is comparing the checksum of each message on the server
> to see if Outlook already has it.
>
> But there is a problem. His Outlook has been set to leave a copy of all
> messages on the server - not to delete old ones n days after I was
> downloaded. And so his account has 260,000 messages and 33 GB (yes, I
> had to count the digits several times to make sure!) of data.
>
> That's a hell of a lot of messages...
>
> Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the server
> which are older than a certain date - eg the date of the last message in
> January that he successfully received into Outlook? He's reluctant to
> delete everything, right up to the present date, because he's like a
> copy of the January-to-now messages for his records.
>
> How does Outlook process the "leave a copy of messages on the server"
> and "delete older than 30 days" combination? Does it do that deletion
> first, or only after it has finished synchronising all the messages
> between server and client? In other words, is it worth me cancelling the
> "get new messages", setting "delete after n days" and then restarting?
> It's been working away (with debugging turned off again now it's proved
> that it's started the POP conversation) for about 18 hours with no
> visible effect, so I presume it hasn't got to the new messages yet to
> start them appearing one by one in the Inbox.

In the old days, this approach would work. Telnet to a particular
port (the POP3 port), would allow a simple exchange to take place.
This particular script does not "pull" messages to check the
date. You would need to use statistical sampling to ascertain
the rough structure of this huge cache of info. In todays
crypto environment (where plaintext passwords aren't allowed),
it's possible you'd need stelnet to some other port number.
Just don't test with DELE, read a single email number, then quit.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/remove-or-delete-all-emails-message-from-a-pop3-server.html

I don't think, necessarily, the message numbers have to be
rationalized. The message queue could contain 1 3 4 5 6 ....
and 2 could have already been deleted and is missing numerically.

So maybe there are 2000 messages as in 1 2 3 1990 1991 259992 259993 260000

I don't know if POP3 servers ever have reason to renumber messages.
If they did that, it would "confuse" the client.

https://electrictoolbox.com/pop3-commands/

You can always set up your own email server in a test environment.
This is what I use for testing "Mail.App" in Windows 10, in a
Windows 10 VM. At the time, their server was free (for home test
sorts of things).

https://www.hmailserver.com/

Here, you can see me using telnet on the POP3 port.
The "top 1 0" just returns the header of message 1 and
it isn't exactly concise (header has many lines, doing
260000 would amount to a lot of transfers which might
exceed connection limits of some sort).

https://i.postimg.cc/G2qNBBTW/telnet-pop3.gif

And in Windows 10, Programs and Features : Windows Features
has a telnet client. Presumably I could choose to restrict
my email server to the SSL/TLS port number, instead of
allowing port 110. But at least that shows a live demo
of me talking to my email server with telnet.

Paul

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 11:19:18 +0100, "NY" <me@privacy.invalid> wrote:

>Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the server which
>are older than a certain date?
>
>
>
>A customer of mine uses MS Outlook 2016 to read POP mail from his
>yahoo.co.uk mailbox. Because of Yahoo's change in policy about passwords
>(Yahoo's POP server now needs a machine-generated password rather than the
>account password which he has set up), he's not been receiving any mail
>since January - he's been relying on Yahoo's webmail interface.
>
>I've resolved the password issue and Outlook appears to be able to establish
>a POP dialogue with the server: I can see it listing the number of messages
>and the collective size of them all, as well as listing the ID numbers of
>them all. But it stalls at "comparing blobs" which I presume is comparing
>the checksum of each message on the server to see if Outlook already has it.
>
>But there is a problem. His Outlook has been set to leave a copy of all
>messages on the server - not to delete old ones n days after I was
>downloaded. And so his account has 260,000 messages and 33 GB (yes, I had to
>count the digits several times to make sure!) of data.
>
>That's a hell of a lot of messages...
>
>Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the server which
>are older than a certain date - eg the date of the last message in January
>that he successfully received into Outlook? He's reluctant to delete
>everything, right up to the present date, because he's like a copy of the
>January-to-now messages for his records.
>
>How does Outlook process the "leave a copy of messages on the server" and
>"delete older than 30 days" combination? Does it do that deletion first, or
>only after it has finished synchronising all the messages between server and
>client? In other words, is it worth me cancelling the "get new messages",
>setting "delete after n days" and then restarting? It's been working away
>(with debugging turned off again now it's proved that it's started the POP
>conversation) for about 18 hours with no visible effect, so I presume it
>hasn't got to the new messages yet to start them appearing one by one in the
>Inbox.

For a brief period, I had 60,000 emails in an MS Outlook folder, but that's
a far cry from 260,000. Still, I'd be curious, if it were me, to see what
Outlook does if it was asked to download 260,000 emails.

I'd create a rule in Outlook that 'permanently deletes' (rather than simply
'move to trash'), based on his time criteria, then let'r rip. BTW, I'd get
the heck off of POP and onto IMAP, but that's not really related to the
current issue.

--

Char Jackson

NY <me@privacy.invalid> wrote:

> Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the server which
> are older than a certain date?
>
> A customer of mine uses MS Outlook 2016 to read POP mail from his
> yahoo.co.uk mailbox. Because of Yahoo's change in policy about passwords
> (Yahoo's POP server now needs a machine-generated password rather than the
> account password which he has set up), he's not been receiving any mail
> since January - he's been relying on Yahoo's webmail interface.
>
> I've resolved the password issue and Outlook appears to be able to establish
> a POP dialogue with the server: I can see it listing the number of messages
> and the collective size of them all, as well as listing the ID numbers of
> them all. But it stalls at "comparing blobs" which I presume is comparing
> the checksum of each message on the server to see if Outlook already has it.
>
> But there is a problem. His Outlook has been set to leave a copy of all
> messages on the server - not to delete old ones n days after I was
> downloaded. And so his account has 260,000 messages and 33 GB (yes, I had to
> count the digits several times to make sure!) of data.
>
> That's a hell of a lot of messages...
>
> Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the server which
> are older than a certain date - eg the date of the last message in January
> that he successfully received into Outlook? He's reluctant to delete
> everything, right up to the present date, because he's like a copy of the
> January-to-now messages for his records.
>
> How does Outlook process the "leave a copy of messages on the server" and
> "delete older than 30 days" combination? Does it do that deletion first, or
> only after it has finished synchronising all the messages between server and
> client? In other words, is it worth me cancelling the "get new messages",
> setting "delete after n days" and then restarting? It's been working away
> (with debugging turned off again now it's proved that it's started the POP
> conversation) for about 18 hours with no visible effect, so I presume it
> hasn't got to the new messages yet to start them appearing one by one in the
> Inbox.

Use the archive function in Outlook. Move or delete all messages older
than 8 months old. You can move the messages into an archive PST file
which will take them out of the message store; however, you can then use
File -> Open to load the archive.pst into Outlook. The archive will be
presented as a separate tree of folders in that file. While the
messages got moved out of the message store, they're still available by
viewing them in the archive store. Or, delete the messages if he really
doesn't need them. You could run archive twice: once to delete really
old messages, like over 5 years old, and again with it moving old
messages into an archive file.

Understand there are 2 archive settings: one which will flag messages as
*candidates* to move to archive, and another that decides how often the
archive functions runs. You could flag messages over 5 years old to get
archived, but they don't actually get moved into the archive file until
the archive function is ran. Say you archive message older than 1 year.
You schedule the archive to run once per month. That means the
candidates pile up during the month, and get moved when the monthly
archive function gets ran. Archiving will momentarily impact use of
Outlook. To reduce how many messages get moved at a time from the
message store into the archive file and shorten the archive run, you
could schedule a daily archive run. Only the few messages that have
exceeded the retention period within a day get moved into the archive.

Been a couple years since I last used MS Outlook. The folks over in the
microsoft.public.outlook.general might have other suggestions.
Archiving is how I reduced the size of message stores. If you load the
archive into Outlook, you can also run archiving on the archive. The
archive settings are seperate for each message store. You could have
the primary message store's archive run once per day to move out
messages older than 1 year into, say, 1yeararchive.pst. After using
File -> Open to load the 1yeararchive.pst file, you can set its archive
settings to move out messages older than 2 years into 2yeararchive.pst.
Then use File -> Open to load 2yeararchive.pst. You can repeat this
chaining of archives archiving into older archives. I had a chain of up
to 5 message stores: main, 1year, 2year, 3year, and 4year. I saw no
reason to keep messages over 5 years, so archiving was set to delete
messages over 5 years old in the 4yeararchive.pst file. You MUST load
the archive files into Outlook, so Outlook can exercise its archive
function on the message store where it can flag candidates that are over
their retention threshold and where the archive is schedule to run. I
had the archive function run daily on the main message store, but only
monthly on the archives.

If keeping archives around, especially to chain them, for some retention
threshold is too complicated, just use the archive function manually.
When you decide to cleanup, use the archive function to decide how old
is too old to keep messages in the main message store, and then decide
on the action of delete or move (into an archive PST file).

Just remember archiving takes 2 setups:
- Select the message store to configure retention threshold on all
folders, or only on the folders you specify. (*)
- Enable AutoArchive to run the archive function at the specified
interval.

(*) You don't need to use the same archive retention on all folders.
- For me, I always cleaned up my Inbox folder by deleting or moving into
another folder. Anything left there that was over a month old was
obviously unimportant since it got no attention and I had not decided
to keep it by moving into another folder (see later comment about
using an archive folder), so I set the archive retention to 1 month on
the Inbox with action=delete.
- I had a subfolder under Inbox called Pending. I'd move out messages
from the Inbox into Pending that I wanted to look at later, but if I
hadn't looked at them in 2 months then obviously they weren't
important anymore, so archiving was set to a 2-month retention on the
Pending folder with action=delete.
- I also had a "keep" folder called Archive (not part of the archive
function, so I could've called it Keep) where I wanted to move
messages I wanted to keep to keep for far longer, so archiving was set
to never do anything on messages in the Archive/Keep folder. Those
messages always stayed in my main message store, and never moved into
any archive, and never got deleted (since it had already been my
cleanup/organization choice to permanently keep messages by moving
them into the Archive folder).
o However, under the Archive folder were subfolders named by topic,
like Work, Craigslist, Personal, Computer, etc.
* The Work messages expired after 1 year with action=archive (and
then got chained into subsequent archives for up to a 5-year
retention).
* I kept Craigslist items (on my sales there) for 8 months with
action=delete. If an item didn't sell in a month, it got donated
or trashed (I didn't keep renewing my auctions), and if an item
sold then I didn't need to track it for more than about half a
year.
* Personal stuff had a retention of 1 year with action=archive, and
with my archive chain it would get retained for 5 years.
* Archiving on the Computer subfolder was disabled, since I wanted
to keep everything there forever, like software purchases and
licenses. Every few years I'd visit the folder to see if there
were items on hardware or software I didn't have anymore.
- I didn't want to keep anything in the Trash folder over a couple
months, so archiving was set to 2 months on that folder with
action=delete.
- Archiving was set to 1 week with action=delete on the Junk folder.
There could be false positives that moved a wanted item into the Junk
folder, but if I hadn't reviewed a junked messaged in a week then it
got deleted.
- Retention on the Sent folder was set to 1 year with action=archive
(move old sent items into the archive file, and chain them into
subsequent archives for 5 years).
The point is you can set archiving to run recursively through all
folders in a message store using the same settings in each folder, or
you can set retention on a per-folder basis. That's for flagging when
messages became archiving candidates. Separately was how often you
wanted auto-archive to run. You need to do BOTH settings: decide what
become eligible for archive, and when archiving runs. Just flagging
without running does nothing.

You can have Outlook schedule how often it archives the flagged items,
or you could run it manually, like when doing catastrophic cleanup.

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 11:19:18 +0100
"NY" <me@privacy.invalid> wrote:

> Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the
> server which are older than a certain date?
>
>
>
> A customer of mine uses MS Outlook 2016 to read POP mail from his
> yahoo.co.uk mailbox. Because of Yahoo's change in policy about
> passwords (Yahoo's POP server now needs a machine-generated password
> rather than the account password which he has set up), he's not been
> receiving any mail since January - he's been relying on Yahoo's
> webmail interface.

You also have to add that secure key to the Email client in order to
receive mail.

>
> I've resolved the password issue and Outlook appears to be able to
> establish a POP dialogue with the server: I can see it listing the
> number of messages and the collective size of them all, as well as
> listing the ID numbers of them all. But it stalls at "comparing
> blobs" which I presume is comparing the checksum of each message on
> the server to see if Outlook already has it.
>
> But there is a problem. His Outlook has been set to leave a copy of
> all messages on the server - not to delete old ones n days after I
> was downloaded. And so his account has 260,000 messages and 33 GB
> (yes, I had to count the digits several times to make sure!) of data.
>
> That's a hell of a lot of messages...
>
> Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the
> server which are older than a certain date - eg the date of the last
> message in January that he successfully received into Outlook? He's
> reluctant to delete everything, right up to the present date, because
> he's like a copy of the January-to-now messages for his records.
>
> How does Outlook process the "leave a copy of messages on the server"
> and "delete older than 30 days" combination? Does it do that deletion
> first, or only after it has finished synchronising all the messages
> between server and client? In other words, is it worth me cancelling
> the "get new messages", setting "delete after n days" and then
> restarting? It's been working away (with debugging turned off again
> now it's proved that it's started the POP conversation) for about 18
> hours with no visible effect, so I presume it hasn't got to the new
> messages yet to start them appearing one by one in the Inbox.
>

MY ISP is AT&T but they use Yahoo for Email.

You can delete all messages or part of the messages on the Yahoo
website.

He could move the messages he wants to keep to another folder, like
trash, delete the remaining messages and move the ones he wants to keep
back to the inbox.

If you right click on the inbox, you will get the option to clean up
the inbox. I haven't tried this because I don't keep any messages on
Yahoo, they all come straight to my Email client.

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 at 13:24:26, VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> wrote (my
responses usually follow points raised):
>NY <me@privacy.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the server which
...........................................................^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>> are older than a certain date?
>>
>> A customer of mine uses MS Outlook 2016 to read POP mail from his
[]
>> But there is a problem. His Outlook has been set to leave a copy of all
>> messages on the server - not to delete old ones n days after I was
>> downloaded. And so his account has 260,000 messages and 33 GB (yes, I had to
>> count the digits several times to make sure!) of data.
>>
>> That's a hell of a lot of messages...
>>
>> Does Yahoo webmail have a way of deleting all messages from the server which
>> are older than a certain date - eg the date of the last message in January
[]
>Use the archive function in Outlook. Move or delete all messages older
>than 8 months old. You can move the messages into an archive PST file
[]
>The point is you can set archiving to run recursively through all
>folders in a message store using the same settings in each folder, or
>you can set retention on a per-folder basis. That's for flagging when
[]
NY is asking about a POP, not IMAP, system, which has been set to leave
copies on the server. It is the copies on the server, not the local
copies in Outlook, that he's wanting to (selectively) delete.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your *informed*
opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
- Harlan Ellison, cited by "The Real Bev" in mozilla.general, 2019-12-27

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote in message
news:dO9nIJpp51+gFw4b@255soft.uk...
> NY is asking about a POP, not IMAP, system, which has been set to leave
> copies on the server. It is the copies on the server, not the local copies
> in Outlook, that he's wanting to (selectively) delete.

All references to the archive facility in Outlook are missing the point.
This is messages which are present on the Yahoo POP server but not on the
Outlook client (because of a password misunderstanding). It would seem from
Outlook's logs that it lists the messages and then does a BLOB comparison to
decide which messages are not already in Outlook and therefore need to be
downloaded - it is stalling at the BLOB stage. So the messages in question
have not yet even been transferred to Outlook so can't be archived in
Outlook.

I bit the bullet and looked at Yahoo webmail. It is fairly primitive, and
claims to do things that it doesn't in fact do.

There are options to select "all" messages and then to delete them or move
them to another folder. But it actually only selects a small number of them,
with that number gradually reducing: when I first selected "all" and moved
them, it did 200. A few more cycles of that and it reduced to processing
them in chunks of 100, then 40. This is despite on-screen text talking about
deleting/moving all the remaining [number] messages, where [number]
gradually reduces as there are fewer still to process.

My workflow was as follows (in case anyone else needs to do the same):

1. select a group of messages by clicking on the tick-box of the first (most
recent) one, scrolling down a few screenfuls and shift-clicking on tick box
of the last that I wanted to select

2. move these ("..." button) to another temporary folder

3. repeat 1 and 2 until I'd copied all the recent messages which I wanted to
keep in the Inbox because they hadn't been copied to Outlook

4. Once the Inbox only contained messages that I wanted to delete,
right-click on the Inbox icon in the left panel and select "Archive". This
worked on either 10,000 or 20,000 messages in a chunk (the number varied for
successive chunks).

5. Repeat 4 until there were no more messages and Inbox was empty.

6. Select "all" messages in the temp folder and move them to Inbox - this
actually selected 200,100 or 40.

It took a while to move the 5000 messages that I wanted to keep from Inbox
to temp and temp to Inbox, fairly mindless and automatic process which can
be done while listening to music etc.

I've not yet heard whether this much-reduced Inbox (260,000 messages totally
33 GB, reduced to 5000 messages totalling 1.5 GB) can be digested by
Outlook. No doubt I'll hear when he gets into work on Monday.

NY <me@privacy.invalid> wrote:

> "J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote ...
>
>> NY is asking about a POP, not IMAP, system, which has been set to
>> leave copies on the server. It is the copies on the server, not the
>> local copies in Outlook, that he's wanting to (selectively) delete.

But NY's description makes it appear Outlook is too full to accept more
messages from the server. Delete (via archive) and compact the local
message store to make room to get more from the server.

> All references to the archive facility in Outlook are missing the point.
> This is messages which are present on the Yahoo POP server but not on the
> Outlook client (because of a password misunderstanding). It would seem from
> Outlook's logs that it lists the messages and then does a BLOB comparison to
> decide which messages are not already in Outlook and therefore need to be
> downloaded - it is stalling at the BLOB stage. So the messages in question
> have not yet even been transferred to Outlook so can't be archived in
> Outlook.
>
> I bit the bullet and looked at Yahoo webmail. It is fairly primitive, and
> claims to do things that it doesn't in fact do.
>
> There are options to select "all" messages and then to delete them or move
> them to another folder. But it actually only selects a small number of them,
> with that number gradually reducing: when I first selected "all" and moved
> them, it did 200. A few more cycles of that and it reduced to processing
> them in chunks of 100, then 40. This is despite on-screen text talking about
> deleting/moving all the remaining [number] messages, where [number]
> gradually reduces as there are fewer still to process.
>
> My workflow was as follows (in case anyone else needs to do the same):
>
> 1. select a group of messages by clicking on the tick-box of the first (most
> recent) one, scrolling down a few screenfuls and shift-clicking on tick box
> of the last that I wanted to select
>
> 2. move these ("..." button) to another temporary folder
>
> 3. repeat 1 and 2 until I'd copied all the recent messages which I wanted to
> keep in the Inbox because they hadn't been copied to Outlook
>
> 4. Once the Inbox only contained messages that I wanted to delete,
> right-click on the Inbox icon in the left panel and select "Archive". This
> worked on either 10,000 or 20,000 messages in a chunk (the number varied for
> successive chunks).
>
> 5. Repeat 4 until there were no more messages and Inbox was empty.
>
> 6. Select "all" messages in the temp folder and move them to Inbox - this
> actually selected 200,100 or 40.
>
> It took a while to move the 5000 messages that I wanted to keep from Inbox
> to temp and temp to Inbox, fairly mindless and automatic process which can
> be done while listening to music etc.
>
> I've not yet heard whether this much-reduced Inbox (260,000 messages totally
> 33 GB, reduced to 5000 messages totalling 1.5 GB) can be digested by
> Outlook. No doubt I'll hear when he gets into work on Monday.

If there are 260K messages up on the server, seems likely there is a
huge number that are sitting in Outlook's local message store. Per:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/troubleshoot/performance/performance-issues-if-too-many-items-or-folders

The limits for Outlook 2019, Outlook 2016, Outlook 2013, and Outlook
2010 are as follows:

100,000 items per folder
5,000 items per Calendar folder

Since the problem is apparently that Outlook won't accept more messages,
why not use archiving to *severely* reduce the item count in the local
message store to see how many more Outlook can retrieve?

How big are the biggest messages that are sitting on the server? Can
you use their webmail client to sort by size, biggest to smallest, to
then configure Outlook to *not* download messages over, say, 5KB? If
the size limit during retrieve reduces how many messages are retrieved
per poll without Outlook hiccuping, run the archive between each poll,
and then compact the local message store to reduce its physical size.
Then up the max size on retrieve to, say, 10KB, to see if polling still
works, and run another archive job and compact. Keep repeating while
upping the max message size that will be retrieved.

Since there is a limit of 100K items per folder, which would include
Inbox as a folder, doesn't archiving and compacting reduce that count in
the Inbox folder inside the PST file? By reducing how many items are in
the Inbox folder, perhaps you make room for Outlook to retrieve some
more from the server.

Of course, up on the server, if they let your sort by message size, you
could delete the huge messages (likely with attachments) before cycling
through Outlook max size settings. If the user wants to keep the
attachments of some [big] messages, have them extract the attachments to
save them using the webmail client, and then delete the biggies.

On Sat, 24 Jul 2021 20:07:17 +0100, "NY" <me@privacy.invalid> wrote:

>"J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote in message
>news:dO9nIJpp51+gFw4b@255soft.uk...
>> NY is asking about a POP, not IMAP, system, which has been set to leave
>> copies on the server. It is the copies on the server, not the local copies
>> in Outlook, that he's wanting to (selectively) delete.
>
>All references to the archive facility in Outlook are missing the point.
>This is messages which are present on the Yahoo POP server but not on the
>Outlook client (because of a password misunderstanding). It would seem from
>Outlook's logs that it lists the messages and then does a BLOB comparison to
>decide which messages are not already in Outlook and therefore need to be
>downloaded - it is stalling at the BLOB stage. So the messages in question
>have not yet even been transferred to Outlook so can't be archived in
>Outlook.
>
>
>I bit the bullet and looked at Yahoo webmail. It is fairly primitive, and
>claims to do things that it doesn't in fact do.
>
>There are options to select "all" messages and then to delete them or move
>them to another folder. But it actually only selects a small number of them,
>with that number gradually reducing: when I first selected "all" and moved
>them, it did 200. A few more cycles of that and it reduced to processing
>them in chunks of 100, then 40. This is despite on-screen text talking about
>deleting/moving all the remaining [number] messages, where [number]
>gradually reduces as there are fewer still to process.
>
>My workflow was as follows (in case anyone else needs to do the same):
>
>1. select a group of messages by clicking on the tick-box of the first (most
>recent) one, scrolling down a few screenfuls and shift-clicking on tick box
>of the last that I wanted to select
>
>2. move these ("..." button) to another temporary folder
>
>3. repeat 1 and 2 until I'd copied all the recent messages which I wanted to
>keep in the Inbox because they hadn't been copied to Outlook
>
>4. Once the Inbox only contained messages that I wanted to delete,
>right-click on the Inbox icon in the left panel and select "Archive". This
>worked on either 10,000 or 20,000 messages in a chunk (the number varied for
>successive chunks).
>
>5. Repeat 4 until there were no more messages and Inbox was empty.
>
>6. Select "all" messages in the temp folder and move them to Inbox - this
>actually selected 200,100 or 40.
>
>
>It took a while to move the 5000 messages that I wanted to keep from Inbox
>to temp and temp to Inbox, fairly mindless and automatic process which can
>be done while listening to music etc.
>
>
>
>I've not yet heard whether this much-reduced Inbox (260,000 messages totally
>33 GB, reduced to 5000 messages totalling 1.5 GB) can be digested by
>Outlook. No doubt I'll hear when he gets into work on Monday.

5000 emails totaling 1.5GB is trivial for Outlook.

--

Char Jackson

On Sat, 24 Jul 2021 at 16:57:35, VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> wrote (my
responses usually follow points raised):
>NY <me@privacy.invalid> wrote:
>
>> "J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote ...
>>
>>> NY is asking about a POP, not IMAP, system, which has been set to
>>> leave copies on the server. It is the copies on the server, not the
>>> local copies in Outlook, that he's wanting to (selectively) delete.
>
>But NY's description makes it appear Outlook is too full to accept more
>messages from the server. Delete (via archive) and compact the local
>message store to make room to get more from the server.

His Outlook may or may not be full; however, he doesn't _want_ to
download the 33G of messages on the server (apart from a relatively tiny
number of recent ones). Therefore, what he's asking is how to delete
messages before a certain date FROM THE SERVER. He'll sort out his
Outlook - if indeed it has a problem - once he's got rid of what's on
the server. No point in clearing space in Outlook, if it's immediately
going to be filled with old unwanted stuff next time he connects to the
server.
[]
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

You cannot simply assume someone is honest just because they are not an MP.

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:

> On Sat, 24 Jul 2021 at 16:57:35, VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> wrote (my
> responses usually follow points raised):
>>NY <me@privacy.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> "J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote ...
>>>
>>>> NY is asking about a POP, not IMAP, system, which has been set to
>>>> leave copies on the server. It is the copies on the server, not the
>>>> local copies in Outlook, that he's wanting to (selectively) delete.
>>
>>But NY's description makes it appear Outlook is too full to accept more
>>messages from the server. Delete (via archive) and compact the local
>>message store to make room to get more from the server.
>
> His Outlook may or may not be full; however, he doesn't _want_ to
> download the 33G of messages on the server (apart from a relatively tiny
> number of recent ones). Therefore, what he's asking is how to delete
> messages before a certain date FROM THE SERVER. He'll sort out his
> Outlook - if indeed it has a problem - once he's got rid of what's on
> the server. No point in clearing space in Outlook, if it's immediately
> going to be filled with old unwanted stuff next time he connects to the
> server.
> []

And every one of those messages on the server not yet retrieved by
Outlook are all over 1KB in size, over 2KB in size, over 5 KB in size,
and so on as the max size to download starts low and increments upward?

Obviously the webmail client in incapable of the operation desired, but
you keep trying to focus away from using the client to pare down the
messages on the server.

Okay, so what is *YOUR* wonderful solution? Yeah, didn't think so.

"VanguardLH" <V@nguard.LH> wrote in message
news:701jf76cgpyg$.dlg@v.nguard.lh...
> How big are the biggest messages that are sitting on the server? Can
> you use their webmail client to sort by size, biggest to smallest, to
> then configure Outlook to *not* download messages over, say, 5KB?

Incredibly, Yahoo webmail does not have the ability to display the size of
each message (apart from showing a paperclip symbol for an attachment) and
therefore you cannot sort by size. That was the first thing I was going to
do: sort the biggest items to the top of the list and select any from last
year (not yet downloaded to Outlook) so I could delete those first.

"VanguardLH" <V@nguard.LH> wrote in message
news:701jf76cgpyg$.dlg@v.nguard.lh...

> If there are 260K messages up on the server, seems likely there is a
> huge number that are sitting in Outlook's local message store. Per:
>
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/troubleshoot/performance/performance-issues-if-too-many-items-or-folders
>
> The limits for Outlook 2019, Outlook 2016, Outlook 2013, and Outlook
> 2010 are as follows:
>
> 100,000 items per folder
> 5,000 items per Calendar folder
>
> Since the problem is apparently that Outlook won't accept more messages,
> why not use archiving to *severely* reduce the item count in the local
> message store to see how many more Outlook can retrieve?

I will check that 100,000 items per Outlook folder limit when I next see the
PC. I think he's been fairly good at moving messages from Inbox to other
user-created folders in Outlook, but it could be starting to become a
problem. He may need to do some moving/deleting...

Outlook being Outlook, the handling of error conditions, giving *meaningful*
error messages, is a bit limited. I'd need to turn on POP logging to check
how far it was getting, and that slows processing down considerably, Outlook
warns me.

On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 at 00:43:47, VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> wrote (my
responses usually follow points raised):
>"J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:
[]
>> His Outlook may or may not be full; however, he doesn't _want_ to
>> download the 33G of messages on the server (apart from a relatively tiny
>> number of recent ones). Therefore, what he's asking is how to delete
>> messages before a certain date FROM THE SERVER. He'll sort out his
>> Outlook - if indeed it has a problem - once he's got rid of what's on
>> the server. No point in clearing space in Outlook, if it's immediately
>> going to be filled with old unwanted stuff next time he connects to the
>> server.
>> []
>
>And every one of those messages on the server not yet retrieved by
>Outlook are all over 1KB in size, over 2KB in size, over 5 KB in size,
>and so on as the max size to download starts low and increments upward?
>
>Obviously the webmail client in incapable of the operation desired, but

If you are sure about that, it's at least definite information for NY,
though it'll be unwelcome.

>you keep trying to focus away from using the client to pare down the
>messages on the server.

Only because it doesn't seem to be that good an approach, because of the
danger that the server might start downloading vast quantities of old
and unwanted stuff as soon as you connect the client to it.
>
>Okay, so what is *YOUR* wonderful solution? Yeah, didn't think so.

I never said I had one; I just thought lots of people were answering
(often at great length) a question NY didn't ask, such as things to do
with archiving messages already in Outlook, when the main problem is not
messages already in Outlook, but ones still on the server. When I see
what I think are answers to the wrong question, I often try to say so -
I think this is still useful even if I don't have an answer, because (a)
it might speed the OP getting an answer to the right question, (b) it
saves effort on the part of others giving answers at great length but to
the wrong question. We all do it - Mayayana and VanguardLH, Paul (though
he answers the wrong question less often), and me too [though less often
as I know less (-:].

Thinking: AIUI, what happens when a client makes a POP connection to a
mail (or news - I know that's not POP) server is that it has in effect a
telnet-like conversation with the server, though the details of that
conversation are usually hidden from the user (sometimes findable in log
files, monitoring windows, etc.). I wonder, would it be possible to open
an _actual_ telnet - or similar - connection to the server, outside the
client, and manually achieve what's desired? Someone more familiar with
POP commands could maybe answer this. I _hope_, if this is possible at
all, that something like "delete all before X" (where X is ideally a
date, but could be an MID) would be possible, though I can see it might
instead be necessary to download lots of MIDs, then outside the session
create a batch file with the POP command for "delete" before each one,
then squirt that back - tedious and probably have to be done in several
goes, but should involve less traffic than downloading all the messages,
or even just their headers.

Any POP experts out there?
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to
be doing at the moment. -Robert Benchley, humorist, drama critic, and actor
(1889-1945)

On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 14:27:03 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
<G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:

>On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 at 00:43:47, VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> wrote (my
>responses usually follow points raised):
>>"J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:
>[]
>>> His Outlook may or may not be full; however, he doesn't _want_ to
>>> download the 33G of messages on the server (apart from a relatively tiny
>>> number of recent ones). Therefore, what he's asking is how to delete
>>> messages before a certain date FROM THE SERVER. He'll sort out his
>>> Outlook - if indeed it has a problem - once he's got rid of what's on
>>> the server. No point in clearing space in Outlook, if it's immediately
>>> going to be filled with old unwanted stuff next time he connects to the
>>> server.
>>> []
>>
>>And every one of those messages on the server not yet retrieved by
>>Outlook are all over 1KB in size, over 2KB in size, over 5 KB in size,
>>and so on as the max size to download starts low and increments upward?
>>
>>Obviously the webmail client in incapable of the operation desired, but
>
>If you are sure about that, it's at least definite information for NY,
>though it'll be unwelcome.
>
>>you keep trying to focus away from using the client to pare down the
>>messages on the server.
>
>Only because it doesn't seem to be that good an approach, because of the
>danger that the server might start downloading vast quantities of old
>and unwanted stuff as soon as you connect the client to it.

I'm not seeing the danger of which you speak. The client in this case is
Outlook, which has a decent rules engine that can be used to spray incoming
messages into different folders or delete them immediately, as two examples
out of many available.

If the OP had just proceeded, instead of all of this back and forth, they'd
have been done with the project long ago.

--

Char Jackson

Char Jackson wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 14:27:03 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
> <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 at 00:43:47, VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> wrote (my
>> responses usually follow points raised):
>>> "J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:
>> []
>>>> His Outlook may or may not be full; however, he doesn't _want_ to
>>>> download the 33G of messages on the server (apart from a relatively tiny
>>>> number of recent ones). Therefore, what he's asking is how to delete
>>>> messages before a certain date FROM THE SERVER. He'll sort out his
>>>> Outlook - if indeed it has a problem - once he's got rid of what's on
>>>> the server. No point in clearing space in Outlook, if it's immediately
>>>> going to be filled with old unwanted stuff next time he connects to the
>>>> server.
>>>> []
>>> And every one of those messages on the server not yet retrieved by
>>> Outlook are all over 1KB in size, over 2KB in size, over 5 KB in size,
>>> and so on as the max size to download starts low and increments upward?
>>>
>>> Obviously the webmail client in incapable of the operation desired, but
>> If you are sure about that, it's at least definite information for NY,
>> though it'll be unwelcome.
>>
>>> you keep trying to focus away from using the client to pare down the
>>> messages on the server.
>> Only because it doesn't seem to be that good an approach, because of the
>> danger that the server might start downloading vast quantities of old
>> and unwanted stuff as soon as you connect the client to it.
>
> I'm not seeing the danger of which you speak. The client in this case is
> Outlook, which has a decent rules engine that can be used to spray incoming
> messages into different folders or delete them immediately, as two examples
> out of many available.
>
> If the OP had just proceeded, instead of all of this back and forth, they'd
> have been done with the project long ago.
>

The project has to be done with some care, because just
like USENET news servers have high-performance and
low-performance "commands", so does email.

To pull the entire thing down, all 260000 headers and bodies
would take forever and a day. Let alone break some "rule" added
to the thing by the admin at the other end.

You want to find the least intrusive way of listing the contents,
followed by "dele" until the number has dropped to a decent level.

I would assume the messages arrive in (rough) calendar order, so
if you check message 5000 and it's 1998, and message 10000 is 1999,
it would be reasonably safe to dele 5000 through 10000. Maybe a dele
takes a tenth of the time that reading the message would take.

But pulling all 260000, even if the receiving end has the worlds
best rules engine, that would take many tries, analysis of
failures, and so on.

Paul

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:

> On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 at 00:43:47, VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> wrote (my
> responses usually follow points raised):
>>"J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:
> []
>>> His Outlook may or may not be full; however, he doesn't _want_ to
>>> download the 33G of messages on the server (apart from a relatively tiny
>>> number of recent ones). Therefore, what he's asking is how to delete
>>> messages before a certain date FROM THE SERVER. He'll sort out his
>>> Outlook - if indeed it has a problem - once he's got rid of what's on
>>> the server. No point in clearing space in Outlook, if it's immediately
>>> going to be filled with old unwanted stuff next time he connects to the
>>> server.
>>> []
>>
>>And every one of those messages on the server not yet retrieved by
>>Outlook are all over 1KB in size, over 2KB in size, over 5 KB in size,
>>and so on as the max size to download starts low and increments upward?
>>
>>Obviously the webmail client in incapable of the operation desired, but
>
> If you are sure about that, it's at least definite information for NY,
> though it'll be unwelcome.
>
>>you keep trying to focus away from using the client to pare down the
>>messages on the server.
>
> Only because it doesn't seem to be that good an approach, because of the
> danger that the server might start downloading vast quantities of old
> and unwanted stuff as soon as you connect the client to it.
>>
>>Okay, so what is *YOUR* wonderful solution? Yeah, didn't think so.
>
> I never said I had one; I just thought lots of people were answering
> (often at great length) a question NY didn't ask, such as things to do
> with archiving messages already in Outlook, when the main problem is not
> messages already in Outlook, but ones still on the server.

Yet the OP reported Outlook was erroring on retrieving messages. It
wasn't that he was or would get tons on messages still sitting on the
server. The problem was Outlook was *not* getting them. The webmail
client just doesn't have the tools needed to quickly and easily discard
old messages, or the OP reports that as he deletes that the max count he
can select gets reduced. I do remember when using webmail clients that
using the "All" choice to select messages may only apply to those
displayed in the current web page. All messages in the page got
selected, not all messages in the account. So, you only got to delete
as many messages as were displayed within a web page.

Outlook has limits which appears exceeded and perhaps why Outlook isn't
retrieving them. If Outlook had retrieved all those messages, we
wouldn't be discussing this now. Purging messages (delete and compact)
in Outlook where archiving can help by progressing through oldest
messages first and limiting max size on retrieval to reduce how many
messages are retrieved per poll (I didn't find an option to directly
limit the number retrieved per poll) might get Outlook working again to
get those messages off the server -- but only if Outlook were configured
to issue a DELE after RETR. The OP can't keep leaving messages up on
the server after every poll; else, he has the same problem going forward
of way too many in his account.

If the OP, and you, just want to focus on using the webmail client,
well, only the features available in that client are available for
cleanup. I already mentioned sorting messages by size to allow deleting
the biggest ones first - those that likely have huge attachments because
some boob sender thought e-mail was a file transfer mechanism. As for
deleting messages only on the server side, the OP only has the tools the
webmail client affords to him. Ever see a webmail client with an
archiving function that can work on datestamps of messages?

The OP's Outlook refuses to download more messages. There are ways to
limit how many get retrieved per poll (might want to disable automatic
polling during cleanup and use manual polls), but with Outlook refusing
to download any more then it appears Outlook doesn't have room either
due to too many messages per folder (I doubt the OP has over 5000
folders to exceed that limit) or his PST is too big. Archiving (with
compaction) might make enough room for get more messages. Other than
starting with tiny sizes to limit how many messages get retrieved per
poll (and then using archiving and compaction again), yep, the client
might retrieve too many messages at a time (which could take so long
that Outlook's poll interval is too short, it aborts the current poll,
and starts a new poll, and why automatic polling should be disabled
during cleanup, and should be 5 or 10 minutes minimum to allow
downloading huge e-mails that are less likely to get interrupted by the
next poll).

The OP reports Yahoo Mail's webmail client doesn't give him the
necessary tools to do cleanup. Maybe the client could help, but the
client needs cleanup, too (archive, compact, limit retrieve count, and
repeat).

> Thinking: AIUI, what happens when a client makes a POP connection to a
> mail (or news - I know that's not POP) server is that it has in
> effect a telnet-like conversation with the server, though the details
> of that conversation are usually hidden from the user (sometimes
> findable in log files, monitoring windows, etc.).

From the OP's mention of Outlook's failure to retrieve more messages,
looks like the OP has already looked at Outlook's logs. Logging must be
enabled AND Outlook restarted before logging is effected. Same for
turning it off. They're not the easiest to follow, and knowing the
e-mail protocol and its commands helps figure them out.

> I wonder, would it
> be possible to open an _actual_ telnet - or similar - connection to
> the server, outside the client, and manually achieve what's desired?

Yep, you can telnet into a POP, IMAP, or SMTP server just like you can
into an NNTP server. There are lots of commands per protocol, but most
are easy to understand. You could issue the LIST command to get a list
of messages (by their UID - unique ID) on the server, and issue a DELE
for each, but with hundreds of thousands of messages on the server this
method would be tiresome and take a very long time to issue each delete.
You cannot delete by a range of messages IDs. Each DELE command accepts
only one message UID (Unique ID per message store).

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1939#page-8
DELE msg
Arguments: a message-number (required) which may NOT refer to a
message marked as deleted

The argument is just *one* message ID, not a range of UIDs. If the OP
doesn't want to retrieve the message, he doesn't have to issue a RETR
and then follow with DELE, but hundreds of thousands of DELE commands
would take the rest of the OP's lifetime. Also, those messages to which
you issued a DELE are not actually deleted while in transaction state
between client and server. Not until you issue a QUIT command (the
client disconnects) will the server honor those DELE requests. If the
server aborts the session, like for a timeout (e.g., the OP needs
sleep), all those pending DELEs are discarded.

Unlike the RETR command which can specify a message, but might not if
the client simply wants to retrieve them in order (RETR gets message 1,
RETR again gets message 2, etc), the msg argument for DELE is not
optional. One DELE per message.

Correction (looking at RFC 1939 instead of 1081): The msg argument is
required by the RETR command. It is no longer optional. The OP would
have to request a list of UIDs for all messages, and then issue a RETR
for each one. It is up to the client to remember which UIDs it
already retrieved. The server does not track which ones the client
retrieved. "new" versus "old" is a status tracked by the client. The
client has to record the UIDs it retrieved, and it is the client that
determines if a message is "new" (not retrieved before). IMAP has its
SEEN message status, but POP doesn't have that message status to track
across sessions.

The LIST command can take a msg argument, but that means you already
know what is the UID of a message. Understand that LIST returns the
UIDs of *all* messages in the mailbox, not just the unread ones. The
client tracks whether the UIDs it recorded have been read or not. LIST
will not return just the UIDs that are new from the prior mail poll to
the next poll. LIST returns a scan listing of all messages still
existing in the mailbox, like:

LIST
+OK 264325 messages (<N> octets)
1 <octets>
2 <octets>
3 <octets>
...
264325 <octets>

To be fully correct, and although I tend to merge the commands, LIST
returns an *index* of a message, and why in the above example you see
the messages enumerated as 1, 2, 3, and on to the last one of 264325
(just an example of how many messages the OP might have in his hugely
oversized mailbox). The UIDL command is the one that provides a scan
listing of messages by their UIDs, and looks like:

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote in message
news:1P$9olhnaW$gFwlM@255soft.uk...

> Thinking: AIUI, what happens when a client makes a POP connection to a
> mail (or news - I know that's not POP) server is that it has in effect a
> telnet-like conversation with the server, though the details of that
> conversation are usually hidden from the user (sometimes findable in log
> files, monitoring windows, etc.). I wonder, would it be possible to open
> an _actual_ telnet - or similar - connection to the server, outside the
> client, and manually achieve what's desired? Someone more familiar with
> POP commands could maybe answer this. I _hope_, if this is possible at
> all, that something like "delete all before X" (where X is ideally a date,
> but could be an MID) would be possible, though I can see it might instead
> be necessary to download lots of MIDs, then outside the session create a
> batch file with the POP command for "delete" before each one, then squirt
> that back - tedious and probably have to be done in several goes, but
> should involve less traffic than downloading all the messages, or even
> just their headers.

From looking at the POP log that Outlook generated (because I turned on
debugging) it logged on and then listed all the messages - as a two column
list with sequential number starting at 1 and some form of ID number. It
then said it was doing BLOB (binary large object) comparison, which I
imagine is comparing some checksum of each message wit the messages already
in Inbox, to determine which messages needed to be downloaded.

I was hoping that because Id configured Outlook to delete all messages from
the server which were more than 99 days old (99 was the largest number that
Outlook would accept; I really wanted 250-odd to go back to 1 January 2021)
it would do the deletions first, but I suppose it needs to download the
headers of all the messages to know what the send-date is for each one.

Anyway, I've reduced the number of messages on the server quite dramatically
(260000 down to 5000) so hopefully that will reduce the workload of the
server-versus-Outlook comparison. I will suggest that the customer tried to
remove unwanted messages from the Inbox so that side of the comparison is
reduced as well.

Apparently before the password policy changed, when the webmail login
password was also the POP password, a send/receive operation was very fast.
That was with about 200000 messages on the server and presumably about 20-25
GB of message contents (working pro-rate from the 260000 messages occupying
33 GB) - and the same number of messages in the Inbox.

I do wonder whether the customer may have missed an email in January
announcing that the password policy was about to change, and to generate a
machine-generated password and configure Outlook to use that, But it is
quite likely that in amongst a lot of genuine emails (relating to the
business he runs) and some spam, "housekeeping" emails from Yahoo may have
got overlooked. If it was me., I'd have been calling for help within a week
or so, rather than struggling with Yahoo webmail for so long.

I'm hoping that I won't have to do the same as I did on the server: move all
the "keep" emails into a temp folder in Outlook, delete the rest, and then
move the "keep" emails back into Inbox.

Does anyone know: does compacting a .pst Outlook data file improve
message/folder access at all, or is the main benefit that it reduces the
size of the .pst without having much effect on file access.

I much prefer the approach that Outlook Express (XP), Windows Mail (Vista)
and Windows Live Mail (Win7) use where there is a separate file per email
folder (OE and WM) or a separate file per email message (WLM). It makes it
so much easier to backup, because you are only adding/updating/deleting
files ffrom the backup if that email folder or those email messages have
changed. Outlook's approach means that every time there is a trivial change
to the emails, the whole amorphous .pst file has to be rewritten - and that
may be a multi-GB file.

I also like the OE/WM/WLM facility for backing email account definitions
(POP/SMTP server, logon details, port numbers) to a .iaf file which can be
copied to a new computer with OE/WM/WLM on it, and imported into that setup
so the new email program can immediately access the same accounts. Copying
Outlook's ,pst file and telling Outlook on a new computer to use it *should*
copy the account settings, but in my experience I usually have to generate
the accounts from scratch by laboriously copying all the parameters - and
hope that the passwords have been documented somewhere.

"Char Jackson" <none@none.invalid> wrote in message
news:4h4rfg1d2f01chlaghjjkiofqk7comais2@4ax.com...
> If the OP had just proceeded, instead of all of this back and forth,
> they'd
> have been done with the project long ago.

Having resolved the initial POP password problem which had caused the server
and Outlook to get out of sync by seven months, I tried a send/receive.
Initially I did it with debugging enabled to prove that contact was now
being established, and once I'd established that, I stopped Outlook's
send/receive process, turned off debugging and restarted the transfer
process.

And I left it apparently working (just a "processing" type message) for
about 48 hours with no visible signs of progress - messages did not start
appearing one by one in the Inbox.

So I did "just proceed" once I'd done a quick confidence debug test to see
that things were *starting* to happen.

"VanguardLH" <V@nguard.LH> wrote in message
news:1po2ap2w9d1l6.dlg@v.nguard.lh...
> The OP's Outlook refuses to download more messages. There are ways to
> limit how many get retrieved per poll (might want to disable automatic
> polling during cleanup and use manual polls), but with Outlook refusing
> to download any more then it appears Outlook doesn't have room either
> due to too many messages per folder (I doubt the OP has over 5000
> folders to exceed that limit) or his PST is too big. Archiving (with
> compaction) might make enough room for get more messages. Other than
> starting with tiny sizes to limit how many messages get retrieved per
> poll (and then using archiving and compaction again), yep, the client
> might retrieve too many messages at a time (which could take so long
> that Outlook's poll interval is too short, it aborts the current poll,
> and starts a new poll, and why automatic polling should be disabled
> during cleanup, and should be 5 or 10 minutes minimum to allow
> downloading huge e-mails that are less likely to get interrupted by the
> next poll).

From memory, the Outlook debug log showed the logon process (client supplies
POP username and password) and an OK response, followed by the LIST command
and the list of message number and octets - for all the 260000 messages
which existed on the server at that time, before I pruned the list on the
server to a more manageable size by removing messages which were known to be
already in Outlook.

There was then a "comparing BLOBs" section which contained vast quantities
of lines consisting of two long numbers. I took those to be a checksum of a
message on the server and a checksum of a message on the client to establish
whether each server message was or wasn't present on the client. I left it
doing this for about 10 minutes, but then aborted because I was concerned
that all the logging would slow down the process, so I killed Outlook
(stopping the transfer and closing Outlook, and then checking for Outlook
processes) and restarted it, having turned debugging off. The log file
stopped during the "comparing BLOBs" phase: it had never got onto a UIDL
section or a "download message id n" section (I forget what the POP keyword
is for that).

It is quite plausible that Outlook's Inbox is full, with the maximum allowed
number of messages per folder. That's something to look at, once I've done a
quick test to see if fewer messages on the server allows it to work.

Having pruned the Outlook Inbox, I will look more closely at the debug file
that it now generates, to see what happens after the LIST command and
responses. I was expecting a UIDL section and was surprised that there
wasn't one.

If the Outlook Inbox *is* full, it's intriguiing that (according to the
customer) everything used to work fine until he started getting asked to
re-enter the POP password )because the server password had changed and he
didn't know this). That was presumably with roughly the same number of
messages in the Outlook Inbox as now, though about 5000 fewer messages on
the server.

The moral of the story is that if you set up a POP client to leave messages
on the server, make sure that there is a "delete after n days" clause so
messages don't build up indefinitely. I found messages on the server dating
back to 2011 ;-)

When I'm setting up mail clients on more than one PC which all monitor the
same POP account, I configure one (and only one) client (the master) to
delete after n days, and all the others (the slaves) to never delete. That
means that the master PC will always keep the server pruned, but slave PCs
(eg a laptop or mobile phone for use on holiday, when the master PC is
turned off at home) will still see all the messages that are received after
that time but will always leave them for the master to download a copy (for
my records) when I get back home.

On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 13:03:34 -0400, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

>Char Jackson wrote:
>> On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 14:27:03 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
>> <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 at 00:43:47, VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> wrote (my
>>> responses usually follow points raised):
>>>> "J. P. Gilliver (John)" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:
>>> []
>>>>> His Outlook may or may not be full; however, he doesn't _want_ to
>>>>> download the 33G of messages on the server (apart from a relatively tiny
>>>>> number of recent ones). Therefore, what he's asking is how to delete
>>>>> messages before a certain date FROM THE SERVER. He'll sort out his
>>>>> Outlook - if indeed it has a problem - once he's got rid of what's on
>>>>> the server. No point in clearing space in Outlook, if it's immediately
>>>>> going to be filled with old unwanted stuff next time he connects to the
>>>>> server.
>>>>> []
>>>> And every one of those messages on the server not yet retrieved by
>>>> Outlook are all over 1KB in size, over 2KB in size, over 5 KB in size,
>>>> and so on as the max size to download starts low and increments upward?
>>>>
>>>> Obviously the webmail client in incapable of the operation desired, but
>>> If you are sure about that, it's at least definite information for NY,
>>> though it'll be unwelcome.
>>>
>>>> you keep trying to focus away from using the client to pare down the
>>>> messages on the server.
>>> Only because it doesn't seem to be that good an approach, because of the
>>> danger that the server might start downloading vast quantities of old
>>> and unwanted stuff as soon as you connect the client to it.
>>
>> I'm not seeing the danger of which you speak. The client in this case is
>> Outlook, which has a decent rules engine that can be used to spray incoming
>> messages into different folders or delete them immediately, as two examples
>> out of many available.
>>
>> If the OP had just proceeded, instead of all of this back and forth, they'd
>> have been done with the project long ago.
>>
>
>The project has to be done with some care, because just
>like USENET news servers have high-performance and
>low-performance "commands", so does email.
>
>To pull the entire thing down, all 260000 headers and bodies
>would take forever and a day. Let alone break some "rule" added
>to the thing by the admin at the other end.
>
>You want to find the least intrusive way of listing the contents,
>followed by "dele" until the number has dropped to a decent level.
>
>I would assume the messages arrive in (rough) calendar order, so
>if you check message 5000 and it's 1998, and message 10000 is 1999,
>it would be reasonably safe to dele 5000 through 10000. Maybe a dele
>takes a tenth of the time that reading the message would take.
>
>But pulling all 260000, even if the receiving end has the worlds
>best rules engine, that would take many tries, analysis of
>failures, and so on.

What I very frequently see is that people make things much more complicated
than they need to be. To me, this appeared to be one of those cases. Maybe
not, but that's how it looked to me, especially the part about cascading
archives and using telnet, of all things.

A few months ago, I logged into a gmail account via the web for the first
time - ever, and that was after I'd been using the account via Outlook for
about a dozen years. Much to my surprise, there were half a dozen folders
visible online that I wasn't able to see in Outlook and they contained
about 24,000 emails, mostly forum notifications and other outdated items.
Since it's much easier to download them and delete them locally, versus
deleting them online, I simply let Outlook do the work for me.

Did I care about the feelings of Google's email admin? Nope. Did I need to
do any careful planning, or even take any care at all? Nope. I simply
started the task and minimized Outlook. When I checked back a little later,
it was done.

--

Char Jackson

On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 at 13:03:34, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote (my
responses usually follow points raised):
[]
>But pulling all 260000, even if the receiving end has the worlds
>best rules engine, that would take many tries, analysis of
>failures, and so on.
>
> Paul

Plus it just seems wrong to download messages just to delete them
immediately. OK, with fast everything these days, we sometimes _do_ do
things inefficiently, but when 33G of messages is involved ...
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

I admire you British: when things get tough, you reach for humour. Not
firearms. - Sigourney (Susan) Weaver, RT 2017/11/4-10

Does the customer express vehement disgust in using IMAP to access his
e-mail account? If so, what educated reasons does he give? No one
stays with POP other than "that's what I've used before" argument.
Yahoo Mail supports POP and IMAP. Been awhile since I last used
Outlook, but my recollection of Outlook and many other e-mail clients
when using their pre-configured database with their setup wizards is to
use IMAP, by default, with Yahoo Mail.

After deleting any messages using the webmail client, what about
deleting the account in Outlook, compact the message store, and either
creating a new account in Outlook as yet again another POP account (but
with the "delete after N days" option, as you mentioned), or this time
defining the newly created account defined in Outlook to use IMAP?

Does the customer actually use more than one POP client to access his
e-mail account? If not, there is no reason to enable the "leave
messages on server" option. That was an old death-throe stab at trying
to get POP to emulate a bit of IMAP functionality by allowing multiple
e-mail clients to share the same message left on the server. The
default behavior of POP is to RETR followed by DELE. That meant after
one POP client retrieved a message, it was no longer available to other
e-mail clients. With IMAP, all IMAP clients see the same meesages that
any other client saw. If a message shows up in one IMAP client, it
shows up in other IMAP clients. If an IMAP client deletes a message (an
action by the user), and after the client issues a Purge command
(sometimes automatic by the client, sometimes not), the message will be
unavailable in other IMAP clients. The IMAP clients all together mirror
what is on the server. The user will see the same view in each IMAP
client.

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 at 13:03:34, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote (my
> responses usually follow points raised):
> []
>> But pulling all 260000, even if the receiving end has the worlds
>> best rules engine, that would take many tries, analysis of
>> failures, and so on.
>>
>> Paul
>
> Plus it just seems wrong to download messages just to delete them
> immediately. OK, with fast everything these days, we sometimes _do_ do
> things inefficiently, but when 33G of messages is involved ...

Guess it depends on your "cap".

One of the companies here, which is proud of itself,
currently offers a 50GB/mo cap. So yeah, you'd be trembling
in your boots, at the prospect of 33GB worth of work to do.
That could easily nudge you into extra-charges country
for that month.

The only way it could be worse, is with Hughes Satellite,
where the cap is something like 2GB/mo and the "link" slows
down after that. Which means for a typical consumer, the
link is permanently in slo-go mode :-) Imagine doing
Windows Update on something like that. But it does have
the advantage of working in that cabin in the woods.

Paul

On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 at 12:45:19, VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> wrote (my
responses usually follow points raised):
[]
>Yep, you can telnet into a POP, IMAP, or SMTP server just like you can
>into an NNTP server. There are lots of commands per protocol, but most
>are easy to understand. You could issue the LIST command to get a list
>of messages (by their UID - unique ID) on the server, and issue a DELE
>for each, but with hundreds of thousands of messages on the server this
>method would be tiresome and take a very long time to issue each delete.

But presumably LISTing just UIDs is a lot quicker than downloading whole
messages, or even just their headers (how big is an average header these
days? About 2-4k I suspect.) So if this could be done - even if aborted
after five or ten minutes - and then something like Notepad used to
create a file with DELE before each MID, then another session run to
upload those commands, some progress could be made, in chunks of a size
big enough to make a difference.
[]
>and then follow with DELE, but hundreds of thousands of DELE commands
>would take the rest of the OP's lifetime. Also, those messages to which

Presumably less time (by a manyfold factor) than actually downloading
hundreds of thousands of complete messages, though?

>you issued a DELE are not actually deleted while in transaction state
>between client and server. Not until you issue a QUIT command (the
>client disconnects) will the server honor those DELE requests. If the

That's why I was suggesting aborting the LIST command after a few
minutes, so you can make a batch of DELE commands that is manageable,
and ends with a QUIT.
[]
>is possible, and I have seen examples, like the shell script at
>https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/remove-or-delete-all-emails-message-from-
>a-pop3-server.html

Sounds too good to be true!
[]
>Another problem with telnetting into the server is your telnet
>connection will start a session, but it won't have the necessary
>handshaking for a TLS connection. Most e-mail providers require an
>SSL/TLS connection. Your telnet session will likely get only up to the
>server returning its keyword list (showing what functions it supports)
>and then hang on the USER or PASS prompts, because your telnet

That'd be the bummer )-:.

>connection isn't encrypted. You opened a session via telnet, but you
>cannot use it since encrypted is required. I doubt Yahoo Mail allows
>non-encrypted connections.
>
>> Someone more familiar with POP commands could maybe answer this. I
>> _hope_, if this is possible at all, that something like "delete all
>> before X" (where X is ideally a date, but could be an MID)
>
>Nothing no where close to that is possible via POP commands. The DELE

OK, so lots of single DELE commands (in manageable chunks, not all at
once).
[]
>> Any POP experts out there?
>
>If the OP has no interest in retaining any messages on the server, why
>not contact tech support to have them reset the account? The admin will
[]
If available, that sounds by far the best solution (-:!
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

I admire you British: when things get tough, you reach for humour. Not
firearms. - Sigourney (Susan) Weaver, RT 2017/11/4-10