The developers’ latest ridiculous idea: removing the setting for automatically deleting old messages from the server. Now I have to manually visit the webmail site to delete messages older than a month myself—just to keep my mailbox from getting blocked due to being full.
If you use single-device only (or if you have disappearing messages enabled), your messages will already be deleted.
I think the better proposal would be to delete messages from the server immediately after all of your devices have fetched them.
Really? I had no idea. But what if I have multiple devices?
Just mentioned recently:
This will be in 2.51. In 2.50 they are not deleted even in single-device mode. For single-device we have now fixed it and the fix will be in 2.51: nauta.cu has very few storage and issues with message deletion · Issue #8277 · chatmail/core · GitHub
Primary reason for removal of the “delete messages from the server” option is that we are replacing “show classic emails” with “enforce encryption” and it will slightly change which messages are downloaded. If “enforce encryption” is disabled, Delta Chat will start downloading any unencrypted messages, and users who still have not migrated to using separate inbox for chatting will have their emails deleted then if we keep the option to “delete messages from the server” as is.
Use disappearing messages for each conversation
You are free to use disappearing messages yourself—whether via SMS, the Russian messenger Max, WhatsApp, or whatever else.
But please, give us the ability to use Delta Chat without having to worry that our inbox will fill up—as used to happen before you decided to remove that setting. You must have really racked your brains to come up with that one.
to be clear: chatmail, what most ppl are using, still deletes old messages. single-device or multi-device.
only for the already advanced usecase of “classic email as relay” plus multi-device, the deletion now needs to be configured on the server, and not on the client. or done manually. or one can decide to just not care, as many provider have lots of space.
there are ideas around to add some client-side automation also for that usecase, however, just now, this is not highest priority.
other reasonings for that change are already outlined above