Comment 3 for bug 1924618

Bill, thanks for the proposal. I'll answer as upstream maintainer. The former fetchmail maintainer, Eric S. Raymond, years go, decided against this feature ("do one job well"), but I am open to it.

Technically however I need to change the .fetchids format, so this is release 7.0 business, meaning many months out.

Please re-file this feature request (without the privacy "reason") as new issue here: https://gitlab.com/fetchmail/fetchmail/-/issues and then reference it from this launchpad request.

Notes: The use case of truncating history is also valid for me, OTOH you don't know whether your mail service provider will just put a delete mark on your mail and hide it from your view without actually erasing it, or for some legislations is under some secret surveillance order and blind carbon copies the prosecutor or intelligence, so there is no privacy gain.

For real privacy, e-mail is likely a lost cause and even if you encrypt end-to-end there's a truckload of metadata available to everyone.