What will happen if I Delete mail/cur?

[AndrewX5]

Hi everyone.
I want to reduce the Inode usage on my server.

My Inodes need to be below 100,000 (Files), in order for my Hosting Company to automatically backup my files.
Right now, it is at: 111,885 (Files)

I investigated, and this Directory is taking up the largest portion of my Inodes:
/home/{Server Name}/mail/cur
12,965 (Files)
~11%

So, my question is:
What will happen if I Delete all those files in my "mail/cur" Directory?


My staff and I use Thunderbird and cPanel Webmail to read and reply to our emails.
If I delete what is in that "cur" directory, will it mess up anything for us?

From what I understand, "cur" contains messages that were already read.
I don't know if I need to keep those files live for organization or something.

Will all my emails be marked as "Unread" again if I delete those files?

Is it safe to delete them all without consequences?

Looking forward to hearing from you guys.
Thanks!
-Andrew

 

[ThinIce]

If you delete the cur folder the read mail contained within will be irretriveably deleted. As such you may wish to download or otherwise archive it to another location first

 

[winlinuxadmins]

My staff and I use Thunderbird and cPanel Webmail to read and reply to our emails.
If I delete what is in that "cur" directory, will it mess up anything for us?

From what I understand, "cur" contains messages that were already read.
I don't know if I need to keep those files live for organization or something.

Will all my emails be marked as "Unread" again if I delete those files?

Is it safe to delete them all without consequences?

If you delete the entire folder "cur" or "new" yes it will definitely going to messup mails and its working.

If incoming flow of your mails are high there might be two reason for it
1) Lots of spams coming to your inbox :
2) You might be not deleting mails from server or downloading it on your local system

in 1st case if most of incoming mails are spam suggesting you to enable spamfiltter along with SPF record. there are many slandered practices which you can apply to stop spamming might like to have look on cpanel doc or winlinuxadmins

in another case you need to configure your email client to download mails locally or you may also set email client to delete mails older than 7 days(just for example)

If still its taking lots of inodes on your server /account, you can check it with your server provider or with cpanel.

Regards,
Winlinuxadmins

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

You can configure your email client to use POP3, and ensure that no options are enabled to keep a copy of the email on the local server. At that point, you can remove the files within the "cur" directory for the account, as opposed to the directory itself. Keep in mind that when you remove the files within the "cur" directory, you will no longer see those emails in any Webmail application or email client configured to use IMAP.

Thank you.

 

[AndrewX5]

@ThinIce, winlinuxadmins & cPanelMichael:

Thanks for the advice guys!
What you said all makes sense to me.

I've decided to not delete the files in my "cur" directory.
It's a good thing that I joined here and asked, before taking the risk of deleting them.

Our staff share email access, we are located at different places; so I don't want the emails to be saved locally only for the first person that reads it, and the rest can't see those emails.

What I'll probably do, is try to find some way of backing up some of our earlier emails offline, in a format that can easily be read and accessed.

I'll then delete those backed-up older emails via Thunderbird, and I expect that this will clear up some of that "cur" directory Inode usage.

If I have any problems after I've tried this, I'll let you guys know.
Thanks again!
-Andrew