I haven't deleted an email message since 2018. This was not my intention, but deleting messages from the INBOX doesn't actually delete messages when you're using the ProtonMail Bridge. I have a lot to delete, and delete wasn't working. Over the course of the last week I have discovered the following:

• expunge quietly archives from INBOX, leaving the All Mail copy in tact

• expunge from Trash deletes messages from the Trash and from All Mail

• deleting messages is only accomplished by copying messages to the Trash and then deleting that copy from the Trash

The T383838trash setting in conjunction with folder hooks works pretty well.

From the mutt manual:

3.396. trash

Type: path

Default: (empty)

If set, this variable specifies the path of the trash folder where the mails

marked for deletion will be moved, instead of being irremediably purged.

NOTE: When you delete a message in the trash folder, it is really deleted, so

that you have a way to clean the trash.

This needs to be set to the Trash folder on the IMAP server. IE:

set trash=+Trash

I presume that T383838+ makes it use the IMAP server Trash folder instead of a local directory. I'm having trouble locating the manual section that addresses this.

Setting the trash option is not enough by itself. With this setting on, attempting to delete from the IMAP Trash folder will result in copying the message to the IMAP Trash folder. To get around this, folder hooks are needed.

From the Manual:

9. Setting Variables Based Upon Mailbox

Usage:

folder-hook [!]regexp command

It is often desirable to change settings based on which mailbox you are

reading. The folder-hook command provides a method by which you can execute any

configuration command. regexp is a regular expression specifying in which

mailboxes to execute command before loading. If a mailbox matches multiple

folder-hooks, they are executed in the order given in the .muttrc.

<snip>

Note

Settings are not restored when you leave the mailbox.

I use the following:

folder-hook . 'set trash=+Trash'

folder-hook =Trash 'unset trash'

The result here is that upon entering any folder (even the Trash) the trash option gets set. But then there is an additional hook, that upon entering the Trash folder will unset the trash option. The end result is that using the delete option in any folder (except the Trash) will copy the message to the Trash before trying to delete it form the current folder. If the current folder is the Trash, then the message will just get expunged.

Some quirks:

• deleting thusly from the INBOX works as expected

• deleting from the All Mail folder will cause a tiny hiccup

The INBOX will not complain when a message is expunged, but it also doesn't delete that message from the ProtonMail server. Until the trash is emptied, the message will simultaneously exist in the Trash and the All Mail folder.

Attempting to delete from the All Mail folder will correctly copy to the trash, but then an error will be generated about the expunge failing. It may or may not cause the message to disappear temporarily from All Mail, but refreshing/reloading/whatever will reveal that the message is still present in All Mail and only when the message is deleted and expunged from the Trash will it also be removed form All Mail.

The man page for mutt is somewhat sparse, but there is an html manual. The path might even be mentioned in the man page, it was on my NixOS install. Only problem is that it's an html page, but there's a fix for that! I use w3m on the manual html page in a fashion very similar to how I dump html emails to text, except less automatic.

The following would do it at the command line:

w3m -B -o displaylinknumber=1 -I utf-8 -T text/html < manual.html > output.txt

Of course that requires providing the full path to the manual. Except I open the html page in Neovim, hit (shift) V on the first line, hit (shift) G, and then use a very similar command:

:'<,'>!w3m -B -o displaylinknumber=1 -I utf-8 -T text/html

Tags: index, protonmail, mutt

created: 2025-01-29

(re)generated: 2026-07-17