Tim:
On Evolution, I have it only showing the last 5 day's worth. If it were easily customisable, I might narrow it down to 3 day's worth.
Ed Greshko:
T-Bird has a nice "Retention Policy" on a per folder basis.
Evolution does have retention options, where old messages can be deleted or archived if they're so-many days/weeks/months old, but the filtering (what you see by default) per folder is a less flexible.
Over the years I've tried various clients, but they all suck very badly at replying. Specifically, the mangling of quotes, and how well it'll let you manually unmangle them. Forte Agent was the only client I've come across that would edit properly like you were using a word processor, and understand not to mangle up the greater-than signs being used as quote prefixes into the middle of the text. Evolution was the least-worst mail clients out of the Linux ones I've tried. Thunderbird does a lot of weird stuff I just do not like.
This is an ugly manglification of your text that shouldn't happen, and software should have been written to handle it better decades ago, that I usually hand re-wrap, but I'm leaving it as an example:
If someone posts a reply to messages which hss been deleted and I can't divine what is being said I do one of 2 things. I either ignore it (especially if I'm weak on the subject). Or, I go to the archives. My browser has a bookmark to them so it isn't too much trouble.
I'll just ignore it. If I have to fire up a browser and go searching for it, it's too much effort. I won't be the only one who does that. So people who make it hard to follow their messages are only shooting themselves in the foot.