[NMLUG] automatic mail delete?

[pi at pihost.us (pi)]

havoc wrote:
> I'm hoping to find a solution that I can have the server blow them away 
> without ever downloading them from /var/spool/mail/user, which is a 
> single file.
> 

Well, mail files are single monolithic files containing all the messages 
in a full mailbox. If you want to do this, you should use Maildir 
delivery, which stores each message in a separate file, then use

find /home/scan/Maildir/{cur,new} -mtime -7 -print0 | xargs -0 rm

since maildir mail files have funny characters in their name that -exec 
probably won't like very much.

However, this requires using mail servers that support maildir format. 
Postfix definitely does, as does courier-IMAP, so i suggest those.

> This is for a mailbox I created called "scan" (which is short for "spam 
> can), which I use for creating accounts on sites I would like to get 
> information from, but not receive all of their junk mail.
> 
> j
> 
> Michael Maddex wrote:
> 
>> If you are talking about separate user files, you could try something 
>> like this:
>>
>>     # find /var/spool/mail -mtime -X -exec rm {} \;
>>
>> where 'X' is your 'X days old' and '\;' is part of the syntax.  You 
>> can use the
>> '-i' or '-f' argument to 'rm' if appropriate.  See man find for more 
>> info.
>>
>> Hope this helps.
>>
>> havoc said:
>>
>>> what command would I run to delete messages older than X days old in my
>>> mail spool?
>>>
>>> thanks,
>>> jody
> 
> 
>