Automatically Remove Emails After X Amount of Days

[bobsthename]

I was just wondering if it is possible to automatically remove emails from one imap email account after a certain amount of days/weeks/months?

 

[zEitEr]

Hello,

set a cron task (modify it first to meet you needs):

find /home/userbob/imap/domain.com/info/Maildir/cur -mtime +30 -type f -exec rm -f {} +

before to delete you can run this to list emails:

find /home/userbob/imap/domain.com/info/Maildir/cur -mtime +30 -type f -exec ls -la {} +

to remove emails older than 30 days from inbox of [email protected] of user userbob

 

[turboraketti]

I tried this, and I can see with du at commandline that the mail folders on disk are <20MB, but in the GUI they still show as >50MB after several days. How come?

 

[zEitEr]

How come?

Emails can be stored compressed on a disk. If this is the case, then you see with du their compressed size, while a mail client shows a uncompressed size.

 

[turboraketti]

Good point. But two questions to follow up:
- Which size does DirectAdmin show, compressed or uncompressed?
- The mailbox sizes shown in DirectAdmin are the same as before I ran the purge. Wouldn't that indicate that the purge didn't have any effect?

I also just looked at some individual files in Maildir/new with less and they actually don't look compressed.

 

[zEitEr]

Wouldn't that indicate that the purge didn't have any effect?

Check your folders visually. That's the simplest way to see how it works. I don't know how you executed the command, and whether or not you replaced words marked in bold with your real data. You might double-check it.

For server-wide check you might run:

find /home/*/imap/*/*/Maildir/{cur,new} -mtime +30 -type f -exec ls -la {} +

for printing a list of files of emails older than 30 days in a console. If you see non-empty results then you should really check command you use.

For deleting files server-wide:

find /home/*/imap/*/*/Maildir/{cur,new} -mtime +30 -type f -exec rm -f {} +