Deleting a message sent to all accounts

[bsaxon]

I am trying to delete several messages that were sent to our entire company via a distribution list.

How would I go about this?

I've tried using methods described in these posts with no luck:

1) [SOLVED] Batch delete of specific emails in account

2) How to delete a speceific message from all users

As far as I can tell, deleting a message using "zmmailbox" requires using the message ID that can be found using "zmmboxsearch," which appears to be unique to the message in that particular account. For example: id="91c5acad-8760-4829-a2db-5c8fcba82243:825"

Where as, I can also get a message ID by looking at the message's source, which has the same ID across all accounts for the same message. For example: "10123721.585421221862318493.JavaMail.root@mail.my domain.com"

Any suggestions?

I am basically trying to delete the same message from several accounts b/c the person has sent 30something 5MB messages to 700 accounts and I am running out of disk space as a result.

Thanks!

[bdial]

if you're confident that searching for the specific subject, sender, maybe even date would fetch the right e-mail, couldn't you just script it. Like the logic being

1. use zmprov gaa to get a list of all accounts
2. loop through that list, executing zmmboxsearch to find the message
3. use cut to grab the id from the output of zmmoboxsearch
4. use zmmailbox to delete the message from the account.

[bsaxon]

Okay - I've found the following to address by original need:

1) Bug/Feature Request to add this ability to Zimbra: Bug 24798 – RFE: Locate and delete messages from multiple mailboxes

2) Script to remove message based on subject: King0770-Notes - Zimbra :: Wiki

3) And this Ajcody-User-Management-Topics - Zimbra :: Wiki

Using the script from #2 along w/ a list of email accounts, I was able to effectively go through all accounts and delete a particular message.

But now, I have a new question. After doing this, I didn't notice a significant difference in disk space usage.

When someone sends a 10MB message to hundreds of accounts on the server, how is the disk usage effected? Is it 10MB * the number of accounts? Or does Zimbra do something more efficient for storing the message? I can't figure out how I wasn't able to see any change in disk usage after scanning lots of accounts and large messages.

Thanks!

[nrc]

Originally Posted by bsaxon

When someone sends a 10MB message to hundreds of accounts on the server, how is the disk usage effected? Is it 10MB * the number of accounts? Or does Zimbra do something more efficient for storing the message? I can't figure out how I wasn't able to see any change in disk usage after scanning lots of accounts and large messages.

Thanks!

Zimbra stores a single copy of the message for each postoffice with pointers to the message for each user stored in the database. So deleting the message from users' mailboxes won't make much difference until you delete it from all the users.