Bypass Held Mail?

[Kieran]

Hi,

I am currently getting about 4,500 spam mails a day, and SpamCop does a reasonable job of putting them all in Held mail.

Unfortunately, due to the number of items in Held mail,. I have had to set up an IMAP folder in Outlook Express to download just the spam headers, so I can delete all the spam from within OE. If I try and do this in WebMail, I invariably hang.

What I am asking is whether it is possible for all mail that would go to the Held mail folder, to instead be immediately deleted, so that I don't have to download the headers, in order to, er, delete them.

I apologise if this has been answered elsewhere, or is mentioned in the FAQ's, which I have looked at.

Thanks in advance,

Kieran

[swingspacers]

Such a functionality is not part of the standard tool set. The Spamcop filtering can be fairly aggressive and can result in false positives. If such messages were immediately deleted, I guess there would be complaints, especially from less experienced users.

Here are some suggestions for dealing with your situation:

1. You could try the beta webmail to see how it handles this amount of mail.

2. You could activate tag only mode and forwarding, and then delete in some other account everything that has been tagged.

3. You could use a program like imapfilter or an Outlook rule to automate what you do manually in Outlook Express.

[Jeff G.]

3. You could use ... an Outlook rule to automate what you do manually in Outlook Express.

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No, sorry, you can't. Regrettably, Outlook Express doesn't support the application of rules to IMAP Folders.

[jev]

You could go to the Folders area (4th icon from the left at the top of the Webmail screen), check the checkbox next to the Held Mail folder, and then select "Empty Folder(s)" from the dropdown.

This is what I use, and it works much faster.

-JEV

[swingspacers]

No, sorry, you can't.  Regrettably, Outlook Express doesn't support the application of rules to IMAP Folders.

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I think you misunderstood me here. I said Outlook, not Outlook Express. It would involve the use of a different email program. This might not be what Kieran wants to do, but I thought it was still worth mentioning as a suggestion.

You could go to the Folders area (4th icon from the left at the top of the Webmail screen), check the checkbox next to the Held Mail folder, and then select "Empty Folder(s)" from the dropdown.

This one sounds like a great idea. Do you happen to know how long it takes to empty a folder containing ca. 5000 messages?

[Jeff G.]

Do you happen to know how long it takes to empty a folder containing ca. 5000 messages?

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I just used the above procedure to empty my trash of 1408 messages, and that took 57 seconds, so ca. 5000 messages should take ca. 3.4 minutes. It then took OE6 116 seconds to deal with the loss - it would have been much faster to just delete "imap.spamcop.net - Trash.dbx" from my OE [Message] Store Folder.

[Kieran]

Thanks for all the replies. In one respect I'm glad I didn't miss something when reading the FAQ stuff, on the other hand I'm slightly disappointed, as it seems I'll have to continue manually clearing things out.

I understand *why* it is safe to have to manually peruse, if appropriate, held mail before condemning it to extinction, but it would be nice to have the functionality to do this automatically, albeit with a litigation saving dire warning attached to it.

I have used the empty folder method before, and it seems slow to me, which is why I settled on the IMAP method in OE. It allows me to do everything in one place and has yet to fail/stall, whereas the webmail method have left me somewhat frustrated in the past. As with all web interaction, an hourglass cursor does not always tell the truth.

Again, thanks for the replies!

Regards,

Kieran

[DavidT]

Thanks for all the replies. In one respect I'm glad I didn't miss something when reading the FAQ stuff, on the other hand I'm slightly disappointed, as it seems I'll have to continue manually clearing things out.

There is another choice, but I don't recommend it, which is to simple leave your Held Mail alone and let it "expire" gradually off the server. This can lead to a rather large Held Mail collection, and there have historically been problems with the function that's supposed to expire those messages older than 14 days.

DT