Delete all mail in user's mailbox

Yes, you can just delete the file.

 

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.

 

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

 

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

Thanks

 

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.

 

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

 

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...

 

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

 

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".