If you see the details you will also see instructions to set them.

Are you talking about deletions from a mail server or mail in general?

I suppose the emails I've deleted after reading are still on the server because if I go to the Trash or Junk folders, they are still there, even 3 or 4 years old. I'd like to set a flag or something to automatically delete any email older than 6 or 12 months.

Right-click a folder, Properties, and choose the desired setting on the Retention Policy tab.

I guess I have to do this for each folder? Is there not a universal setting? I have about two dozen primary folders with probably close to 100 sub-folders. That's why I'd hope for a setting that one change cleans up all folders and sub-folders.

The setting can be defined for each account under Account Settings ... Synchronization & Storage.

Thank you very much for the help.

you were talking about your deleted folder. so I would have guessed it was the one you wanted a retention policy for.

Matt,

I was inquiring about automatically deleting old emails for not only the Deleted folder but ALL folders. So now I have set retention policy as described above by sfhowes. I guess it is sort of a universal policy. My question then is when will the emails older than my policy be deleted? Do I have to restart Thunderbird or what? Also, can I override the universal policy at the folder level if I want to delete emails sooner of save them longer?

Thanks,

jbacinti

I would think the retention policy is applied each time TB synchronizes with the IMAP server. The account-specific setting can be overridden for each folder as described in my first reply.