Topic: email cron

[ober]

Does anyone know how to write a cron job that will delete emails in the inbox and sent folders that are more than say 3 months old?

[Mike]

Do you have IMAP access?

edit: Or is this going to be ran on the email server itself? If so what software are you using?

[Steve]

Cron jobs are a valuable skill to learn if you are going to be working with servers.

[ober]

Do you have IMAP access?

edit: Or is this going to be ran on the email server itself? If so what software are you using?

My client is using MAC Mail which apparently doesn't work very well as far as purging mail after x months.

I'm running this directly on the server.  I am not using any software, just direct command line/cron.

I found the path to the folder:

/home/user/mail/domain/account/cur = inbox
/home/user/mail/domain/account/.Sent = sent messages

so now i can just use:

find /path/to/files* -mtime +200 -exec rm {} \;

Sweet. 

Cron jobs are a valuable skill to learn if you are going to be working with servers.

I know how to setup cron jobs... I have over 30 running on this server alone.  My linux command line and mail folder structure knowledge is what was lacking.

[Mike]

Do you have IMAP access?

edit: Or is this going to be ran on the email server itself? If so what software are you using?

My client is using MAC Mail which apparently doesn't work very well as far as purging mail after x months.

I'm running this directly on the server.  I am not using any software, just direct command line/cron.

Sorry I meant, what software your MTA was (which in turn helps points to where the files are.

I found the path to the folder:

/home/user/mail/domain/account/cur = inbox
/home/user/mail/domain/account/.Sent = sent messages

so now i can just use:

find /path/to/files* -mtime +200 -exec rm {} \;

Sweet. 

Isn't find awesome?

[ober]

I'm not actually sure what mail service this web host is running, but I assume most linux mail file structures are similar.

find is awesome. 

[webwhy]

FYI two main formats in the unix world.

maildir and mbox

mbox is the older format, mail is stored in one large file (the mailbox) so you would need another set of text processing commands and lock the file properly to achieve the same result.  i think most sysadmins are using maildir these days.

[ober]

Yeah, this setup uses directories and each email is a file.

[Steve]

Cron jobs are a valuable skill to learn if you are going to be working with servers.

I know how to setup cron jobs... I have over 30 running on this server alone.  My linux command line and mail folder structure knowledge is what was lacking.
[/quote]

My bad