On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 11:10 -0400, Bill Cole wrote:
At 9:22 AM -0400 6/12/08, Jeff Kowalczyk wrote:
I have some (Thunderbird client, dovecot-1.0.13, Maildir) users who get an appalling amount of spam-with-attachment, and it's causing backups to take an inordinate amount of time.
I'll implement some quota and server-side spam management when I go to dovecot-1.1, but in the meantime:
What is the safest way to empty all messages within, but not delete, the following folders from the server command line:
/home/user/Maildir/.Junk /home/user/Maildir/.Trash
I don't want the Thunderbird-2.0.14 client to report corrupt indexing, or worse not show the folder at next use.
The way to do that in a shell (rather than via Dovecot) would be to remove all of the current message files and all of Dovecot's indexing and metadata caching:
cd /home/user/Maildir/.Junk rm dovecot-index* cur/* cd /home/user/Maildir/.Trash rm dovecot-index* cur/*
There's no real need to delete dovecot.index*. They get updated automatically. Probably better if you don't delete them, because if client has the mailbox opened at that time Dovecot will probably log errors about losing the files.
However, I DO clobber the dovecot-uidlist in .Trash as part of my monthly housekeeping because it tends to get very large
All the expunged messages get removed from it the next time a new message is added to the mailbox. So there should be no need to delete it. (v1.1 doesn't always recreate the file, but it gets rewritten if the resulting file would be 70% of the current size or less.)