Assessment thread: Enable a physical expunge after X days

[Robert Widhopf-Fenk]

In VM, messages are marked for deletion but they are only physically removed from the folder when doing an expunge.

Instead of actually deleting them we could also let them die slowly, i.e. only really delete them after they expire a given period. This would ensure that they do not get lost accidentally and could be resurrected if required while still getting them out of view.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Some references to previous VM discussions (Google group for vm.info)

Marc Andreessen on 1993-02-07
Michael Smith on 1993-05-06
Jeff Sparkes on 1993-09-23
Jul 13 1997 by Tuomo Tikkanen
Jakob Schiotz on 2003-03-03 (VM+BBDB, Uwe Brauer notes bbdb-expire package)
Uday Reddy on 2010-04-20 (Assessment of VM thread)

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

A possible solution is to define a VM score, just like GNU score, which gives a score to each message based on a variety of factors. Then:

- messages with scores above a threshold can be archived.
- messages with scores below another threshold can be expunged.
- messages with scores in the middle can be retained for inspection.