[SOLVED] How can I delete all emails from a single account?

[AlanWilliamson]

My main "admin" account has over 100,000 emails in it. 99% of them are from cron jobs that went wrong!

What is a quick way for me to completely nuke all the emails in this particular box?

thanks

[Dirk]

I'm not aware of a function for this, although I suspect there may be one. There are a few hacks to accomplish your goal though.

You could point a pop3 client at the account and set it not to leave the mail on the server. Leaving that to run for a few minutes should rip all the mail out of the mailbox.

You could write a short perl script to accomplish the same goal.

You could delete the account and then create a new one by the same name.

Other than those, I dont know.

[mmorse]

zmmailbox -z -m admin@domain.com emptyFolder /foldernamelikeInbox

or set the email message lifetime to 1 day (easily found in admin console > account> advanced> bottom of page)
-this is the lifetime that an email message can remain in any folder
-0 means don't delete
-see also trash and spam lifetimes
-let us know if you want the CLI for this

[AlanWilliamson]

Mike! You are a genius!

that worked beautifully, and yes, I found the message-alive parameter that is now set to just 1 day.

T H A N K Y O U

[mmorse]

Just don't accidentally set that so low on a commonly used COS instead of an individual account, or users will become really pissed really fast

[protenus]

Just a note, now the admin interface enforces a 30 day minumum....

Any new ideas how to do this?

[hocky]

Something like this should do the trick:

for m in `zmmailbox -m account@domaine.com -p pwd gaf |awk '/\// {print $5}'|sort|uniq` ; do zmmailbox -m account@domaine.com -p pwd emptyFolder $m ; done

[thunder04]

Is there a way to delete items that are in unknown folders? I have a bunch of closed accounts (linked to AD, their usernames are disabled), and I'm working on cleaning out the accounts...but I don't know if users have organized their mail into folders or whatnot.