[SOLVED] How to perform quick bulk deletion?

[kumabhi]

Right now I delete emails using IMAP for all my zimbra user accounts which takes hell lot of time and resource intensive. Is there a command line method to bulk delete emails quickly?

[Matuscak]

Zmmailbox

# su – zimbra
# zmmailbox -z -v -m user@example.com emptyFolder /Junk

[kumabhi]

Thanks for the reply ! I should have been more clear, what I meant to ask is the following: Is it advisable to delete messages directly using rm from zimbra mail store, this way I don't need to write the above command for every mailbox. If its possible, how to go about doing it?

[Hivos]

I'd not advise using rm from the cli, it will mess up the index in mysql.

Perhaps you could set the "E-mail message lifetime" in your CoS. This will delete all email older than xx days.

[kumabhi]

Thanks for the reply ! Again it brings me down to my original question is old email deletion algorithm used by Zimbra scalable for large number of mail accounts? i.e. email older than X days are deleted for all the mailboxes within a reasonable timeframe?

[uxbod]

That is the whole purpose of it

[bdial]

i'm not exactly sure what the algorithm is, but it's designed to scale. i know it only purges a few accounts at a time, so if you have 1000 accounts it's not going to try to purge all of them at once of messages odler than X days. You can set the interval at which the purge runs too. so if you have a lot of users, and your purge interval is pretty large, it could take a while to do the purging.

[kumabhi]

Thanks for the reply! OK...I was wondering if it finds out which accounts have emails older than X days beforehand instead of attempting to purge all the accounts that would save lots of time and computations(also meaningless purge attempts of accounts with only new mails)...By "purges a few accounts at a time" you mean parallel purges of accounts??

[bdial]

ok i took at look at my server and figured it out, it goes by the config option

zimbraMailPurgeSleepInterval: 1m

so every 1min it purges only 1 account, you'll see messages in the mailbox log like

2010-03-11 12:02:35,786 INFO  [MailboxPurge] [name=user1@domain.com;mid=151;] mailop - Deleting items: 3124,3207,3230,3232,3233,3234,3235,3236.
2010-03-11 12:03:35,884 INFO  [MailboxPurge] [name=user2@domain.com;mid=152;] mailop - Deleting items: 72079.

[kumabhi]

I tried setting option for deleting old emails in the email retention time period through web interface. However it says that period should be greater than 30 days !! Now I am stuck, I definitely want it to happen sooner than that, one option I have is IMAP based deletion(slow), is there any faster option available?