[Dovecot] (somewhat ot?) purging old maildir messages

[it-dovecot at ml.epigenomics.com]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2008 00:02:40 -0500,
 "Matt LaPlante" <cyberdog3k at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I know that since maildir uses flat files, I can literally just delete
> messages doing something similar to the following with bash:
>
> for i in $(find /var/spool/vmail/host1/user/cur/ -mtime +30); do
>   rm $i
> done
>

Hi!

If you want to purge emails that have been marked as deleted in
Maildirs, use something like this:

find /var/spool/vmail/host1/user -name '*:2,*T*' -mtime +7 -exec rm -fv {} \;

This deletes all emails older than 7 days which are marked as deleted
(flag T in Maildir format).

We are using this for quite a while and have seen no problems with
dovecot imapd.

Greetings
-- 
Robert Sander                     Senior Manager Information Systems
Epigenomics AG    Kleine Praesidentenstr. 1    10178 Berlin, Germany
phone:+49-30-24345-0                            fax:+49-30-24345-555
http://www.epigenomics.com             robert.sander at epigenomics.com