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Asked: 2016-04-10 06:30:28 +0800 CST

doveadm: Delete messages older than date

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I've a situation where some users keep very old messages (+5 years) on their mailboxes that are just a waste of space and due to safety reasons should also be deleted.

I find out that I could use doveadm for this, however running something like:

doveadm expunge -u [email protected] mailbox INBOX savedbefore 1-Jan-2011

Doesn't have any effect. From my understanding email clients mark email for deletion before the expunge is run on the server to actually remove them.

How can I mark them for deletion using doveadm and then run the doveadm command before or directly and completely delete them?

maintenance dovecot

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Apparently my solution was almost right, I can do what I need with:

    doveadm expunge -u [email protected] mailbox INBOX SENTBEFORE 1-Jan-2011
doveadm expunge -u [email protected] mailbox INBOX.Sent SENTBEFORE 1-Jan-2011
doveadm expunge -u [email protected] mailbox INBOX.Trash SENTBEFORE 1-Jan-2011
doveadm purge -u [email protected]

    Note: You can replace -u [email protected] with -A to target all users on the system.

    Extra for WHM/cPanel Based E-Mail Systems:

    If you're running a WHM/cPanel machine you need to update the size of your mail directories manually:

    /scripts/generate_maildirsize --confirm --verbose account_username

    Or, for all accounts:

    /scripts/generate_maildirsize --allaccounts --confirm --verbose
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