SeaMonkey Help

SeaMonkey Mailnews FAQ

How do I purge newsgroups of old messages?

Depending on what you want to purge, there are a couple of ways to go about it. If you want to get rid of messages that have expired from the server, select the earliest message in that newsgroup. If that article has expired, you should see a message in preview pane telling you that the article has expired from the server, and it will have a link you can click on to "Remove expired messages".

Note: If you are using any version below 1.1.1, a second mailnews window will open, when you click on "Remove expired messages". It's a bug that was fixed in SeaMonkey 1.1.1. Close the second window, when the purge is finished. No harm will be done.

If you want to remove messages that may still be available on the server, you can use SeaMonkey's message aging feature. It can automatically delete messages from folders based upon the age of messages or the number of messages in a given folder. You can set it for an entire account by going to Edit -> Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings -> <your account name here> -> Offline & Disk Space. Under "To recover disk space, old messages can be permanently deleted" set the retention of for all groups on that server. You can also do it per-newsgroup, by slecting the newsgroup in the folder pane, then going to Edit -> Folder Properties, then selecting the Retention Policy tab.