Contrib: How to delete emails based on subject script

[pacsteel]

This may be an old thread, but I ran into this same problem today so I thought I'd share the script I used in case someone else stumbles across this thread via a search engine like I did.

I had a user who sent about 50mb of photographs to every one of the users in her address book. Multiple times if they were in multiple distribution lists. Since I have multiple remote sites that use my Zimbra server via a couple shared DSL lines, this clobbered all the remote locations.

I took examples from a couple of the sources linked earlier in the thread (bdial's psudocode and King0770's script), and combined them. It runs about 35 accounts per minute on my system, so it wouldn't scale too well for larger installations, but it is still way faster than doing it by hand.

The expected inputs are the from_username and subject. The script steps through each account on the server and deletes any messages it finds from the user provided and with the subject provided.

I ran: ./rm_mssg.sh Smart_User "(no subject)"
Smart_User isn't a big fan of filling in the subject when she sends emails so there was some collateral damage, but I didn't care at that point.

#!/bin/bash
# rm_mssg.sh user subject

if [ -z "$2" ]; then
 echo "usage:  rm_message.sh <fromuser_name> <subject>"
 echo "  Rummages through all mail boxes looking for messages from <fromuser_name> with subject=<subject>"
 echo "  Example: ./rm_mssg.sh butthead_user rems "
 echo "  Put double-quotes around multi-word subjects"
 exit 0
else
 addr=$1
 subject=$2

 for usractnopac in `zmprov gaa`
  do
   echo "Searching $usractnopac  for Subject:  $subject From: $addr"
   for msg in `zmmailbox -z -m "$usractnopac" s -l 999 -t message "from:$addr subject:$subject"|awk '{ if (NR!=1) {print}}' |
      grep -v -e Id -e "-" -e "^$" | awk '{ print $2 }'`
      do
        echo "Removing "$msg""
        zmmailbox -z -m $usractnopac dm $msg
      done
   done
fi

[bdial]

handy. you may want to put it on your sandbox too so people could find it searching the wiki

[stealthguitar]

Used this to remove a sensitive email from my mail store BUT it failed to remove the messages from the trash....does this make sense? I would like to run this script again as it is very powerful but am not a coder and can't figure out how to tweak it to delete the message when it's in the trash.

[uxbod]

Welcome to the forums

Silly question but was this in your mailstore; so could you not right click and empty. Or do you mean across the entire mailstore ?

[stealthguitar]

I'm not sure of your question. The message was addressed to "EVERYONE" Someone replied to EVERYONE at our company and my boss asked if there was a way to delete that specific message from the sender quickly. So I found that script and ran it.

I ran the script above as is...I did need change the line
for usractnopac in `zmprov gaa`
to
for usractnopac in `zmprov -l gaa` or it wouldn't run.

[stealthguitar]

No it wasn't just for my email account it was for 100+ accounts.

[bdial]

i bet it has somethign to do with the fact that searching in trash & junk is disabled by default on most accounts and requires explicitely telling it to in advanced search

[bdial]

yah i think so, try doing this

change this line

for msg in `zmmailbox -z -m "$usractnopac" s -l 999 -t message "from:$addr subject:$subject"|awk '{ if (NR!=1) {print}}' |

to

for msg in `zmmailbox -z -m "$usractnopac" s -l 999 -t message "is:anywhere from:$addr subject:$subject"|awk '{ if (NR!=1) {print}}' |

the is:anywhere says to search junk & trash as well