20.3 How the Message Store Removes Messages

Messages are removed from the message store in three stages:

1. Delete. A client sets a message flag to delete. At this point, the message is marked for removal, but client can still restore the message by removing the delete flag. If there is a second client, the deleted flag may not be recognized immediately by that second client. You can set the configutil parameter local.imap.immediateflagupdate to enable immediate flag update.

2. Expunge. Messages are removed from the mailbox. Technically, they are removed from the message store index file, store.idx. The message itself is still on disk, but once messages are expunged, clients can no longer restore them.

   Expire is a special case of expunge. Messages that conform to a set of administrator-defined removal criteria such as message size, age and so forth, are expunged. See 20.9 To Set the Automatic Message Removal (Expire and Purge) Feature

3. Purge. The imexpire utility purges from the disk any messages that have been expunged at 11PM everyday by default. This can be configured with local.schedule.expire, which controls the message expire schedule, and store.cleanupage, which controls the purge grace period (period of time before which the message will not be purged). Note that this is different from the imsimta purge command and configutil parameter local.schedule.purge which purges older versions of the MTA log files.