I would suggest that you should have been looking at
both these lines from the document you mentioned:
- delete (boolean) — if set, getmail will delete messages after retrieving and successfully delivering them. If unset, getmail will leave messages on the server after retrieving them. Default: False.
- delete_after (integer) — if set, getmail will delete messages this number of days after first seeing them, if they have been retrieved and delivered. This, in effect, leaves messages on the server for a configurable number of days after retrieving them. Note that the delete parameter has higher priority; if both are set, the messages will be deleted immediately. Default: 0, which means not to enable this feature.
So the sentence which begins with the word
Note is talking about what happens if you set both
delete and
delete_after options. So if the
delete option is set, the
delete_after option will essentially have no effect.
But notice also that this is discussing what will be done with messages on the
server,
from which fetchmail is retrieving the messages. Are you concerned with deleting the messages from there, or on the system
to which the messages are being fetched?
