Easy way to delete 80000k emails?

Delete inbox mail

I've had to do this in the past and I've found doing this is successful. Run it at your own risk.

1) First, rename the 'inbox' file to back it up.

mv /home/<username>/mail/<mydomain.com>/<login>/inbox /home/<username>/mail/<mydomain.com>/<login>/inbox.bak

Where...

<username> = your cpanel login
<mydomain.com> = your website
<login> = your email login name (before the @mydomain.com)

2) Then try to send and receive email. It should be empty. You may need to restart POP/SMTP.

3) Try sending an email to yourself and see if the 'inbox' file is recreated. If that works and it downloaded your test email message, then remove the 'inbox.bak'

rm /home/<username>/mail/<mydomain.com>/<login>/inbox.bak

Let me know if that works.

 

or just echo "" > /home/<username>/mail/<mydomain.com>/<login>/inbox

but you wont have a backup like the other guy said

 

or cat /dev/null>/home/<username>/mail/<domain>/<user>/inbox

that willl empty it leaving the mailbox intact

 

this will also keep the perms right and it's quick

 

actually I think I have been using cp /dev/null /home/user/mail/domain/mailuser/inbox

 

Some say that shutting down your mail server for three days will also do the trick. If you do this, please let me know if it works.

 

Shutting down your mailserver for 3 days won't work, but if you drink only red wine and sleep with your head pointing north for a week, and make VERY sure you don't step on any cracks in the sidewalk during that time, that will do the trick every time. Guaranteed. Promise.






:D



(ps: and looking into RBLs for the domain in question might help too!)

 

Who the hell can afford to shutdown the mail server for like three days?
I don't blame brianoz for making fun of that comment. :p

Regards,

 

RBLs do it ..I started using them serverwide 3 months ago and graphing with MRTG blocks and delivered and the total # of blocked and total emails have dropped dramatically. One box would block 120k per day ..now it's only seeing 40k emails per day. I think the spammers give up on boxes that block ..but it could be that they all live in Calif and the rain and mud has washed them away.

 

Ahhhh ... but I'm an Aussie, and we make fun of anything that isn't tied down :D

 

it just empty's the box to to /dev/null land and leave everything as it should be it takes one second and they are all gone

 

I have several defalut email accounts that are like 1.5GB. I've just used a script from this forum to set all default emails address to :fail: but now I'm stuck trying to clean up these huge unused email inboxes.

Can the quoted code above empty a default email account inbox also? Something like...

Code:

cat /dev/null>/home/username/mail/inbox

If not, can someone tell me a way empty the cpanel default email accounts... preferably not the sloooooooowwwww FTP way.

Thank you all!
Peter

 

Hello again,

Actually, I tried this and it seems to work...

Code:

$ cd /home/username/mail
$ rm -rf cur
$ rm -rf new

It completely removes the "new" and "cur" email folders for the default account.

Is there anything wrong with this technique? Will cPanel/WHM still provide accurate disk usage and quotas etc...?

Thanks for any help and or advice,

Peter

 

Hello Peter,

We have been using this method for a very long time and never had any problems from doing so.
I can confirm that our disk usage still update correctly after this fix has been done.

Thanks

 

If you are getting that much spam to the master address for the account, sounds like you probably have setup the address as a global default for the domain.

This is always a bad idea because spammers will just send spam to random names at your domain which normally would never be delivered but since you accept a global default, it instead gets delivered and the spam piles up in huge amounts.

Really you should set the default for the domain to ":fail:" and then setup the account names tha you actually use for the domain individually as email accounts or aliases.