[Dovecot] How to delete old mails in dovecot 1.2.x

[Steve Litt]

On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 01:28:28 +0200
Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:

> On 17.2.2012, at 0.39, Przemysław Orzechowski wrote:
> 
> > I need to delete old mails from over 100 mailboxes with average of
> > 10k mails / mailbox 
> > Is there a way to delete old mails (by message date not file
> > creation date) as with doveadm in dovecot 2 ?
> 
> You can delete them by mtime or by ctime:
> 
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Expire#v1.0_cronjob_equivalent
> 
> If by "message date" you mean the Date: header, then there's no easy
> way.
> 

Would something like the following work for the date header?

#!/bin/bash
for msg in *; do
  if b4.py $msg 20080216; then
    rm $msg
  fi
done

#!/usr/bin/python

datestring = get_dateline() ## FIND DATE HDR AND RETURN THE STRING
yyyymmdd = format2yyyymmdd(datestring)  ## CONVERT TO YYYYMMDD
if yyyymmdd < sys.argv[1]:
  sys.exit(0)
else:
  sys.exit(1)


In the preceding, would the deletions mess up maildir indices?

Thanks

SteveT