Delete all mail in user's mailbox

[monaghan]

I have a user with over 100Mb of mail, they have not been monitoring their default mailbox and didn't set it to default to a mailbox they do monitor

I've been asked to purge the default mailbox, can I simply delete the user's /~username/mail/inbox ?

I've not yet converted to maildir (if that makes a difference)

 

[chirpy]

Yes, you can just delete the file.

 

[monaghan]

Many thanks, I've done this many times on non cPanel boxes, just a bit twitchy doing it on a live cPanel box

 

[chirpy]

The kindest way is usually to empty it rather than delting it, i.e.

cat /dev/null > /path/to/inbox

or

>/path/to/inbox

if you prefer. However, there's usually no issue with simply deleting the file, exim will recreate it if it needs to to deliver new email.

 

[WindyT]

On a related note,

How do you empty everyone's spam box across the server.
Ultimately, I'd like to set a cron to do this on Sunday nights.

Setting one spam box to empty is one thing, but I'm wary of trying a catchall to delete everyone's.

Or am I just going about this the wrong way?

Thanks

 

[krystalx]

There is an article on removing spam via cron already search through the forums.

Thanks

 

[rpmws]

here is a quick question while we are on this subject. Let's say you are using maildir and a users new or cur folder has so many emails in it that you get an error when you do a rm * ?? something like too many arguments or files to delete.

 

[casey]

here is a quick question while we are on this subject. Let's say you are using maildir and a users new or cur folder has so many emails in it that you get an error when you do a rm * ?? something like too many arguments or files to delete.

Good question. I had this same issue before with a non-mail directory. I ended up doing
rm -rf a*
rm -rf b*
rm -rf c*
and so on. It was a real pain.

 

[PWSowner]

Good question. I had this same issue before with a non-mail directory. I ended up doing
rm -rf a*
rm -rf b*
rm -rf c*
and so on. It was a real pain.

I've had to do that too, but I cheated and wrote a quick little script to do it for me.

 

[casey]

I've had to do that too, but I cheated and wrote a quick little script to do it for me.

You smart people and your toys.... :p

 

[Snowman30]

If an account is using maildir how can we purge that specific account?

I found a site that has over 50000 emails in their catchall and its just way too slow to try and do it via webmail...

 

[chirpy]

Just delete the individual mail files from the respective directory (cur new).

 

[brianoz]

The nice thing about maildir is that it's really easy to remove (age) individual messages now - something like:

cd ~user/mail/theirdomain.com/person (alter as needed)
find cur new -name '????*' -mtime +14 -print | xargs rm -f

which removes files older than 14 days, the '????*' bit is to avoid removing "cur" or "new".