Dear God Almighty in Heaven Above Why did I Not get => WARNING before connecting email

[BurlesonBrad]

I'm just a dude. Just a lowly dude. Just a humble lowly husband and dad of three girls. Paving my way in this WordPress world that we live in. I thought about giving this a whirl on my personal site and get some folks to test it, maybe even use it for a client or two. I like reading docs and setting things up correctly, so... Imagine my surprise when I put my email in, setup my SMTP creds, and found

It imported EVERY email ~ ever.

If it said this somewhere in the docs, and I missed the fact that I would now have a butt ton of emails in my wp_db, I apologize. Please allow me to take this moment to pull my leg off so that I can kick myself in my own ass.
If however, that little detail is not mentioned with a warning, or something saying something like:

"Yo! Before you connect these emails, please understand that we're not just connecting your email to use for support. We're actually going to pull all of them into WordPress

....then please add it so that morons like me would know that little detail ahead of time.

Thank you. Love, Brad

[iandunn]

hehe, thanks for the thoughtful report :)

Downloading all the messages seems like the intuitive behavior to me, since that's what happens whenever you add a new mail account to Thunderbird, Gmail, etc, but I can see how maybe people could assume this would behave differently.

I'm not sure we should change that behavior, but it definitely wouldn't hurt to document it.

Also, it should only download messages from the inbox; do you really have 31,000 messages there? Or maybe there's a bug and it downloaded from all folders, including Trash?

[BurlesonBrad]

I don't remember how many emails are in there, but with a quick glance of page (hold on lemme pick one)....

There's an email from page 19 (of 22). That's gotta be from at least a year and a half ago.

I was expecting to just have the email capacity "connected" to SupportFlow. I mean, imagine Joe Schmoe the support person thinking, "Man, that @iandunn fella is a sexy beast and I really want to download and use SupportFlow." ok, so far so good, right? Then Joe Schmuckatelly (hi!) wants to use this for a larger plugin support site. So he (or she) goes and follows all the instructions, and winds up with thousands of emails (hi!) from previous conversations ~ some having nothing to do with support, and most of those emails were from resolved issues that happened WAY before they ever came across the SupportFlow option. Kinda doesn't make sense to import all those emails, right? But, it does make sense to have $current_and_moving_forward emails in the dashboard.

My trash itself is set to "delete on exit". So, I know it's not pulling from there.

Any chance you'd be interested in reminding my budding-learning-curve-butt how exactly it is I go into phpMyAdmin and delete all these at once? just askin' 👍

[aaroncampbell]

I saw this come through my Inbox, and while I haven't really faced this issue I thought I'd weigh in on the number of E-Mails in my Inbox. If I were to set this up using my main E-Mail and not set up a special E-Mail for it (which would be my normal MO), I currently have 67,829 emails in my inbox (no, that does not include folders, etc).

Maybe a sanity limit (based on number or age)? Or maybe just documentation warning what will happen (so you can archive stuff into a non-inbox folder before connecting it up)?

[BurlesonBrad]

I'm not sure why, but deep down in my $humbly_learning_as_fast_as_possible cranium, 'tis good to see that my struggles are shared by some of the best & brightest minds ~ like @aaroncampbell #whoop!

OK, now.... correct me if I'm wrong but....

Shouldn't the 'workflow' / 'wireframed code' / whatever_y'all_geniuses_call_it included some type of
if {
email originates from frontend ticket or if email matches self added customer
then
rock on with the emails back and forth
else
do not pass any existing emails back and forth in the backend
}

[iandunn]

Any chance you'd be interested in reminding my budding-learning-curve-butt how exactly it is I go into phpMyAdmin and delete all these at once?

phpMyAdmin isn't a great option, because you also need to delete the rows in wp_postmeta that correspond to the posts themselves in wp_posts. WP-CLI is probably the easiest way, if your server has it installed (or lets you install it locally, in your home directory):

wp post delete $(wp post list --post_type='sf_ticket' --format=ids) --force --defer-term-counting

If your running Multisite, you'll need to add a --url=https://example.org parameter to both commands.

[BurlesonBrad]

sorry @iandunn , this can be closed. 😄

I put on a pot of coffee, sat in the dad chair, put on some classic rock while the girls were at tumbling, and just went through all the pages clicking "select all" & "delete".
Thanks for gettin' back w/ me though. Greatly appreciated!

[iandunn]

It's probably something we should still address, even if it's just some quick documentation, since the plugin will move the messages from the INBOX folder to the ARCHIVE folder, which also wouldn't be desired for your use case.