Re: Automatic purging of old email in all mailboxes
"Scott W. Sander" <scottwsx96@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 7dError: 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@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The downside is that the Dovecot caches will be out of date.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@gmail.com>
I used this guide as the starting point for this postfix + Dovecot server: http://www.binarytides.com/install-postfix-dovecot-debian/.
My /etc/dovecot/dovecot-users passwd-file only has username:password (as mentioned in that article) and my userdb driver is static as laid out in the article as well. Therefore I do not have uid's.
As far as changing the userdb driver from static to passwd-file, I'm not sure what the consequence of that would be for my existing mailboxes or my Dovecot implementation in general. Everything I needed thus far is working, I just want to add clearing out old email automatically.
On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 4:13 PM Joseph Tam <jtam.home@gmail.com> wrote:
"Scott W. Sander" <scottwsx96@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 7dError: 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@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@gmail.com>
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 29, 2016, at 3:29 PM, Scott W. Sander <scottwsx96@gmail.com> wrote:
I used this guide as the starting point for this postfix + Dovecot server: http://www.binarytides.com/install-postfix-dovecot-debian/.
My /etc/dovecot/dovecot-users passwd-file only has username:password (as mentioned in that article) and my userdb driver is static as laid out in the article as well. Therefore I do not have uid's.
As far as changing the userdb driver from static to passwd-file, I'm not sure what the consequence of that would be for my existing mailboxes or my Dovecot implementation in general. Everything I needed thus far is working, I just want to add clearing out old email automatically.
On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 4:13 PM Joseph Tam <jtam.home@gmail.com> wrote:
"Scott W. Sander" <scottwsx96@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
Cron
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@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@gmail.com>
participants (3)
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Edgar Pettijohn
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Joseph Tam
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Scott W. Sander