Saving old IMAP emails on computer but not server

[Astral Cars]

I'm looking for a way I can get mail.app to save all my emails locally on the HD (easy), but delete them off the server after a certain date (less easy). This all is quite simple for a POP account and that's how I've had it set up for awhile, but I now have an iMac, a PB and an iPhone and I don't want to have to sort through emails three separate times, thus IMAP seems the way to go. I've encountered a fair share of messy transitional problems already, but I'm pretty confident I can sort those out.

The real issue is getting all my old emails to stay on my computer and appear in my inbox, but to get them to be removed from the mail server since I have limited storage space on there. I'm thinking this can be achieved by some sort of automator action, but I'm not quite sure how. Please share any possible solutions; I'm curious what others might come up with. Thanks.

 

[blodwyn]

The real issue is getting all my old emails to stay on my computer and appear in my inbox, but to get them to be removed from the mail server since I have limited storage space on there. .

I'm not aware of any way you can delete the messages from an IMAP server, and still have them show up in your inbox. The whole point of IMAP is that the messages stay on the server so you can access them from multiple points.

Your solution may be to use an IMAP service that has more storage space, such as GMail or Fastmail. Both can be set to pull emails from other servers, so once you've set it all up it's pretty transparent.

 

[sahnert]

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you can archive your old email and save it somewhere on your mac. The contents will be searchable in spotlight and the messages will open in the mail viewer. Do this every couple of months or so and you will keep your your server happy but still have access to messages if you need to.

 

[blodwyn]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5C1 Safari/525.20)

you can archive your old email and save it somewhere on your mac. The contents will be searchable in spotlight and the messages will open in the mail viewer. Do this every couple of months or so and you will keep your your server happy but still have access to messages if you need to.

The problem with this is that you lose access to the emails from the other devices, unless you save the emails on all of them.

 

[Astral Cars]

Hmm, you'd think there's a way to get the archived emails to shop up in Mail.app too.

hmm...ideas?