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

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Julian Bonpland Mignaquy
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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:

  1. Delete the mailbox from the server and create it again - all emails will be removed;

  2. 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://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/article_attachments/360009079459/script.sh
        # chmod +x ./script.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:

        # ./script.sh

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

Doveadm-Search-Query

Doveadm-Expunge

Comments

4 comments

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  • Avatar
    Nathan Wilson

    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.

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  • Avatar
    Anton Maslov (Edited )

    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
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  • Avatar
    Stavros T

    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. 

     

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  • Avatar
    Jason Millis

    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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