In my boredom, I was cleaning up my own public mailbox, do I really need lists/newsletters/forums posts from the 90's .. I think not, but lets still keep 5 years and expunge the rest... or try to... but expunge doesnt want too...

This error or lack of action, occurs on any mailbox, as an example

doveadm expunge -u my@email mailbox Lists.FreeRadius SAVEDBEFORE $

now for $, pick your value 5 y/Y for years doesn't appear to exist, so converting it into 30 odd weeks, 30w or 30W did nothing, but rough convert it down to days 1800D appears to do something - showing a delay before returning to command line, but in reality it does nothing, 1800, 1500, 1200, nothing, only when I drop it to 1000D does it actually work, which is not suitable, since I'd like to keep 5 years worth.

Running doveadm -Dv exp... shows no errors just usual debug output about the base modules, quota stuff, and opening mailbox message followed then by user session closed, nothing at all anywhere that points to an error for executing this task, I did deliberately break it by altering the mailbox name to test and it rightfully did report the error the mailbox doesn't exist.

I thought it might be size related, freeradius one of the smaller lists having about 150k to nanog the biggest with over 400k message, but I have others, like monthly newsletters with over 20yrs worth, but only 250 to 300 messages in their mailboxes that also fail, so it can't be barfing out at the size.

Aki, any ideas? Or have I have hit a ridiculously low 1000D hard coded limit?

...and I know some troll will comment, so let me say yes I know I can and will likely have to use nix's "find" to actually cull them, but if doveadm has an expunge option, it should do what it is asked of it :)

# doveconf -a # 2.3.20 (80a5ac675d): /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf # Pigeonhole version 0.5.20 (149edcf2) # OS: Linux 5.15.117 x86_64 Slackware 15.0 ext4

• Yes I know 2.3.21 was released 2 days ago, but I'm not seeing anything in changelog/NEWS that's related

-- Regards, Noel Butler

This Email, including attachments, may contain legally privileged information, therefore at all times remains confidential and subject to copyright protected under international law. You may not disseminate this message without the authors express written authority to do so.
If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender then delete all copies of this message including attachments immediately. Confidentiality, copyright, and legal privilege are not waived or lost by reason of the mistaken delivery of this message.