Cleaning the mail folder ? (what are all these "dot something" folders)

[ben74]

Hello guys,

I've recently changed Host (the old one wasn't reliable anymore) and I found some strange things in the "mail" folder...

namely a TON of folders with a name starting with a "point", e.g. :

[email protected]_com
.user_name.new.1364327465_H628912P32238_omega_domain_co_uk,S=2179
.user_name.new.1364388294_H872161P25622_omega_domain_co_uk,S=6881
.user_name.new.1363799794_H360591P5207_omega_domain_co_uk,S=1982
(and probably 100 more like these)
.user_name.cur.1321444694_H98599P7095_optic_domain_co_uk,S=1631:2,S
.user_name.cur.1321444699_H452919P7121_optic_domain_co_uk,S=1633:2,S
(and probably 100 more like these)
.info.new.1413795981_H566398P678346_cronos_domain_co_uk,S=1421
.info.new.1413796217_H189684P682010_cronos_domain_co_uk,S=1455
.info.new.1413796569_H915219P686800_cronos_domain_co_uk,S=1455
(and probably 100 more like these)

...each of these weird ".something" folder contains INSIDE it the three folders cur/new/tmp...

why is there that much ".something" folders ??? can I delete them ?

Assuming I don't need / don't want to keep ANY existing emails in my current cpanel account, what is the proper way to "clean" the mail folder ?

Thanks,

Cheers,

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

You can first delete any existing email accounts and forwarders through the cPanel interface. At that point, you should only have directories associated with the default email account in the mail directory. EX:

/home/username/mail]# ls -al
total: 40
drwxr-x--x  9 username username 4096 Oct 13 09:54 ./
drwx--x--x 18 username username 4096 Oct 13 09:54 ../
drwxr-x--x  2 username username 4096 Oct 13 09:54 domain.com/
drwxr-x--x  2 username username 4096 Jun 19 11:04 cur/
drwxr-x--x  5 username username 4096 Jun 19 11:04 .Drafts/
-rw-------  1 username username   10 Oct 24 14:37 maildirsize
drwxr-x--x  2 username username 4096 Jun 19 11:04 new/
drwxr-x--x  5 username username 4096 Jun 19 11:04 .Sent/
drwxr-x--x  2 username username 4096 Jun 19 11:04 tmp/
drwxr-x--x  5 username username 4096 Jun 19 11:04 .Trash

It's okay to delete any additional files or directories since you want to remove all previous email data.

Thank you.