I have 13392 files smaller than 4k

Running the other command it looks like modest is hogging all the space for IMAP cache I think. If the numbers were in megabytes, then the modest tree was sucking up 1.2 gigs. I'd post the list but the n900 conked out loading Maemo.org so this post is from another device

How to clear those modest folders out? It would seem that modest is anything but!

Modest is modest, the problem is your emails. You have too many of them. The easiest way is to simply delete your emails. Emails are meant to be read and deleted, no one needs to keep all of them.

One easy solution if you do not want to selectively delete your emails is to delete and re-create your account(s). Deleting an account will delete all cached emails. Re-creating it will then re-download all the email headers (which may take a while if you have thousands), but not the whole emails. Those will get downloaded only when you open them. Presumably you will not open all of them.

There is one problem with Modest. It does not save sent emails in the Sent folder of a specific account, but in a local Sent folder cached on the phone only. That one will have to be purged manually. You can move messages from that folder to your IMAP folders if you wish.

See.. That's what I thought IMAP would prevent way back when I set it up..; IMAP's not POP, mails live on server.. But if Modest is keeping everything it ever downloaded then it might as well be POP!

I'll remove some of those accounts and re-add them. It would be nice i I could set max 60 days of headers etc .. is it possible?

I can't say I disagree there are improvements to be made to Modest. Still, you should see the default email clients on some more "modern" phones. Then you will pine for good old Modest!

I'm not sure if that was an intended pun or how obvious it is to others but I thought it was a nice reminder that we also have quite a modest email client in the form of good old Pine!

It was not intentional but well spotted!

(Seriously, I really like Modest. I like the way it organizes stuff neatly in folders, the way they are organized naturally. I like how it does not pretend to be something else, like e.g. Jolla's email client does. I like how it deletes emails immediately. The only two things I do not like is the bug with accented characters in names and the bug mentioned above, with the sent emails not synchronized automatically.)

I would be pretty p'ed off if my mail client had to be online to be able to reread mail that I had already previously downloaded and read.

OTOH, that's how IMAP works. You need to be online to read your emails.

Hmm. I keep mine. Right now, I've got all my (non-junk-mail) e-mail going back to about 2005. It isn't always useful to keep all that stuff, but it is sometimes handy.

Of course, I've got them archived and compressed on a hard drive, I don't try to copy them all to my phone.

Well, that's part of how IMAP works. It provides a great deal more support for managing mail on the server, so that you don't need to keep copies of emails on your client. However, there is no requirement that IMAP clients use this feature (or that they cannot locally cache mail that is stored on the server). And while I do use IMAP, I like the ability to cache at least some mail on my phone, as I live in an area of the world with very spotty cell phone coverage...

I've got email dating back to sometime last century (~1997) which was originally in Outlook then got imported into KMail when I ditched Windows at around 1999. When the KDE peeps decided to push out a half-baked Kde4 to replace the mature Kde3 I had to stop using KMail for long time until about 2-3 years ago when KMail for Kde4 became usable again.

Indeed, if an email client doesn't allow storing local copies of email then one might as well use bloody webmail