I run a Gentoo (LAMP server) with a qmail.
I see that the folder /var/qmail/alias/.maildir/new/ contains 100'000s of files.
Do you know how I can have them purged automatically?
Thanks for your great help.
EDIT: I checked the files (+400k actually). They are from 2004-today. They all have the same header (toto.com is a replacement of the real domain):
Return-Path: <#@[]>
Delivered-To: [email protected]
Received: (qmail 27514 invoked for bounce); 17 Sep 2009 15:46:37 +0200
Date: 17 Sep 2009 15:46:37 +0200
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: failure notice
If I use outlook and check the account postmaster I do not see them.
each file represents a separate email. if you dont need them you can delete them, i guess easiest way is to do rm -rf /var/qmail/alias/.maildir/ and then use maildirmake /var/qmail/alias/.maildir, if I were you though I'd open some of them just to be sure that you not deleting something important although if you have 100k of emails most likely its outdated/spam/bounces
After deleting them you probably want to investigate why you have them.
They look like double-bounces (the "#@[]" in the return-path/envelope sender), so check a) the contents of /var/qmail/control/doublebounceto (which, if not present, defaults to "postmaster") b) the contents of the relevant .qmail file.
(I'd take a guess that ~alias/.qmail-postmaster contains "./.maildir/" or similar, as well as some other location that you are actually checking when you check what you believe to be the postmaster account.)