Automatic purging of old email in all mailboxes

[Joseph Tam]

"Scott W. Sander" <scottwsx96 at gmail.com> writes:

> A few of the mailboxes in Dovecot receive hundreds of emails per day.  I'd
> like to automatically remove all emails in all mailboxes and mailbox
> folders that were received more than 90 days prior to the received date.
> As I'm a novice Dovecot administrator, I'm not exactly sure what the best
> way to accomplish this is, but I've started looking at the "doveadm
> expunge" command.  I figure I could create a cron job that calls this
> command with the -A switch and that has a search query that finds all
> emails older than 90 days.

That more of less what I do.

 	doveadm expunge -A mailbox INBOX savedbefore 7d

> Error: User listing returned failure
> doveadm: Error: Failed to iterate through some users

I think this may be avoided (or made into warnings) if you bracket all
user UID ranges with

 	first_valid_uid = {first user uid}
 	last_valid_uid = {last user uid}

Sean Greenslade <sean at seangreenslade.com> then writes:

> Since you're using maildirs as the storage backend, it might be easier
> to just write a small script in the language of your preference (bash,
> python, perl, etc.) that walks the directory tree and deletes files
> based on their mtime.

The downside is that the Dovecot caches will be out of date.  Perhaps
follow this up with a "doveadm index ..." operation.

Joseph Tam <jtam.home at gmail.com>