deleting email older than 30 days

[david510]

Hello,

How can we set up cron in cpanel that will delete mail from the inbox that is older than 30 days? Or can we setup this option in any of the webmail or outlook any ideas?? Or can we write any php script for this to delete mail from a specific inbox and set this script as a cron to run once in every month like that ?? any ideas of this??

Regards,
David

[chirpy]

There's always the Aging option that cPanel have added available within cPanel > Mail > Manager Accounts > Aging:

Mail aging is the process in which e-mails will be removed from the server automatically, upon successful log out of a pop3 session. This deletion will only occur if the messages are older then a specified amount of days.

Other than that cludge, I'm not aware of a solution to do this nicely. Unfortunately, too many people leave mail on the server in POP3 accounts, when the protocol was never designed with that in mind. It's meant to be a temporary store that the user retrieves in its entirety and then deletes once received. So, it really is the users responsibility to delete their email after they have received it. That said, I'm not aware of any scripts that do what you're looking for, but they may be out there.

[david510]

THANKS THANKS THANKS THANKS

It works..

[maverick23]

There's always the Aging option that cPanel have added available within cPanel > Mail > Manager Accounts > Aging:


Other than that cludge, I'm not aware of a solution to do this nicely. Unfortunately, too many people leave mail on the server in POP3 accounts, when the protocol was never designed with that in mind. It's meant to be a temporary store that the user retrieves in its entirety and then deletes once received. So, it really is the users responsibility to delete their email after they have received it. That said, I'm not aware of any scripts that do what you're looking for, but they may be out there.

does it even works when we check the mail through webmail?

[chirpy]

No idea, but I doubt it.

[tloffman]

Aging not working for me either. I have several email accounts set up and mail is being forwarded from the various addresses to my primary address. When I log in I am able to get all of my forwarded mail OK and then my email client (Eudora) deletes from server. However, mail is NOT deleted from the accounts that forwarded the mail to my primary account. So, I set aging to 1 day. However, it NEVER works. When I go back into my accounts the old email is always on the server. After reading the various posts here and working with aging myself my conclusion is that it just isn't working - so it's a bug in the software. My hosting company can't figure it out either. In the .pdf doc file for cPanel aging isn't even mentioned.
Tom Loffman

[kernow]

I don't know how do do this for all inboxes but for just one inbox, you could set up a cron to run every x days with the command something like:

cd /home/username/mail | echo -n > inbox

This would delete the contents of the inbox file without deleting the actual inbox !!!

[truehustercom]

seems that would be a bad idea. what if there is mail unread and the cron is ran and your important data is deleted.

[chirpy]

Indeed, that would be a terrible idea - you would almost definitely lose email. The best solution is really to educate users in how email works. That they should use POP3 if they want to retrieve email immediately and to not use their email clients option to leave email on the server. OR to use IMAP if they want to leave email on the server. Email and account quotas are there to prevent users doing stupid things like leaving email on the server that they should be retrieving locally.