How to delete all or some emails from a mailbox without logging in to the mailbox on a Plesk server?

Leonid Gukhman

Updated November 24, 2022 04:05

Plesk for Linux kb: how-to ABT: Group A

Applicable to:

Plesk for Linux

Question

How to delete all or some emails from a mailbox without logging in to the mailbox?

Answer

Right now this feature is not implemented in Plesk. Please vote for it on our Plesk UserVoice portal: the most popular features are likely to be included in one of the next Plesk versions.

As a workaround, one of the following methods can be applied:

Delete the mailbox from the server and create it again - all emails will be removed;
Directly manipulate with Dovecot administrative utilities on a server:

Note: SSH access to the server is required.
Mailbox should be enabled: The "Mailbox" option is checked in Domains > example.com > Email Addresses > joedoe@example.com
- Get the information about existing mailboxes:
  
  # doveadm mailbox list -u user@example.com
  
  INBOX
  INBOX.Spam
  INBOX.Drafts
  INBOX.Trash
  INBOX.Sent
- Remove all messages older than a week from the 'Inbox' folder for the particular mailbox user@example.com:
  
  # doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox '*' before 1w
- Remove all messages older than a week from all folders except 'Inbox' folder for the particular mailbox user@example.com:
  
  # doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox INBOX.'*' before 1w
- Remove all messages from 'Drafts' folder on all example.com domain mailboxes:
  
  # for i in $(plesk bin mail -l | tr '\t' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 3- | grep example.com); do doveadm expunge -u "$i" mailbox INBOX.Drafts all; done
- Delete all messages from the particular mailbox user@example.com:
  
  # doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox 'INBOX' all
  # doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox 'INBOX.*' all
- Remove all messages from 'Spam' and 'Trash' folders from all mailboxes on all domains:
  
  # for i in $(plesk bin mail -l | tr '\t' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 3-); do doveadm expunge -u "$i" mailbox INBOX.Spam all; done
  # for i in $(plesk bin mail -l | tr '\t' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 3-); do doveadm expunge -u "$i" mailbox INBOX.Trash all; done
  
  Note: courier-imap does not support these commands
- Also the procedure can be optimized by deleting all emails for all mailboxes specified in a file:
  - Download the following script and grant permissions:
    
    # wget https://github.com/plesk/kb-scripts/raw/master/mailbox-doveadm-expunge/mailbox-doveadm-expunge.sh && chmod +x ./mailbox-doveadm-expunge.sh
  - Edit/Create file mbox.txt and specify all mailboxes for you wish to remove emails from:
    
    CONFIG_TEXT: johndoe@example.com
    ...
    jjohndoe2@example.org
  - Execute the script:
    
    # ./mailbox-doveadm-expunge.sh

More information on these features could be found in official Dovecot documentation articles:

Doveadm-Search-Query

Doveadm-Expunge

#!/bin/bash
for mailbox in $(plesk bin mail -l | grep -v Alias| tr '\t' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 3-); do
doveadm expunge -u $mailbox mailbox 'INBOX.Trash' since 4weeks
doveadm expunge -u $mailbox mailbox 'INBOX.Spam' since 2weeks
done

Comments

7 comments

Nathan Wilson June 15, 2020 22:34
Hi,

I'm looking at running a daily job to delete all spam items older than 1 month (like Gmail does).

Can I confirm this command will do the trick?
```
for i in $(plesk bin mail -l | tr '\t' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 3-); do doveadm expunge -u "$i" mailbox INBOX.Spam before 1m; done
```
Thanks.
0

Comment actions Permalink
Anton Maslov June 16, 2020 01:27 (Edited December 11, 2020 16:04)
Nathan Wilson syntax looks correct, thought we do not test any anything like this to guarantee it will work for 100%.

p.s. I would do a small change to your command to exclude aliases as they have no separate mailbox:
```
for i in $(plesk bin mail -l | grep -v Alias| tr '\t' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 3-); do doveadm expunge -u "$i" mailbox INBOX.Spam since 4weeks; done
```
1

Comment actions Permalink
Stavros Tsalikoglou September 11, 2020 08:58

That is a great one! thanks for that.

This script solves a major problem with the clients that using gmail pop3 to get their emails.
Gmail does not grab the spams and the plesk mailboxes getting full.

0

Comment actions Permalink
Jason Millis November 16, 2020 10:44
Anton Maslov & Nathan Wilson, the `1m` in your snippets would remove all mails older than 1 minute.

From dovecot's documentation, supported time units are:
```
Available time units are: weeks (abbr: w), days (abbr: d), hours (abbr: h), mins (abbr: m) and secs (abbr: s).
```
I've just made that mistake, thankfully it was only on my emails in the trash folders.

I'd suggest you use 31d to cover the longest months.
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Alejandro Garcia de Alba May 13, 2022 18:32

Hi, how can this be done for Plesk in Windows?

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Comment actions Permalink
Tobias Sorensson September 26, 2022 11:14
i edited the script that plesk provides here
```
#!/bin/bash
for mailbox in $(plesk bin mail -l | grep -v Alias| tr '\t' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 3-); do
    doveadm expunge -u $mailbox mailbox 'INBOX.Trash' since 4weeks
    doveadm expunge -u $mailbox mailbox 'INBOX.Spam' since 2weeks
done
```
i hope that his helps someone. this script will delete all mail in trash that is older than 4 weeks and it will also remove all mail in spam folder that is older than 2 weeks.
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Comment actions Permalink
Steve Yates October 07, 2022 22:05

The shown syntax mailbox '*' did not work for me, I had to use mailbox INBOX instead. mailbox INBOX.'*' as shown worked for other/sub folders.

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