Re: Sdbox/mdbox purge on Public folders

 On 15/02/2026 05:27 EET luke g via dovecot <[1]dovecot@dovecot.org>
 wrote:


 Hi dovecot mailing list people,

 After having looked through the mailing list archives, tried various
 search engines & asked an LLM to hallucinate an answer all to no avail,
 I now pose the following question to you all:

 For a Dovecot 2.4 system that uses mail_driver = mdbox for regular
 mailboxes and also has a public namespace, how might I invoke the
 maintenance routine of `doveadm purge` against the m.1, m.2 ... m.N
 files under the mail_path location?

 Below is the snippet of what I have in the configuration files for the
 public namespace:

 namespace public {
         type = public
         separator = /
         prefix = Public/
         mail_path = /var/spool/mail/Public
         mail_index_private_path = ~/public
         subscriptions = yes
         mailbox "communal" {
                 auto = subscribe
         }
 }

 Since my dovecot instance is a self-hosted matter, I am in a position to
 move all mail data out of there, delete any left over storage files and
 change the mail_driver to Maildir, if that is the easiest way to manage
 the risk of dbox m file sprawl/growth.

 Best regards,
 Luke

One easy solution is to treat Public as a regular mail user whose mail_path is /var/spool/mail/Public

Aki

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