How do I purge a linux mail box with huge number of emails?

Question

I have setup some cron jobs and they send the crons result to an email. Now over the months I have accumulated a huge number of emails.

Now my question is how can I purge all those emails from my mailbox?

In case you want to clean only the cron messages and not other messages, see here: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/217143/how-to-clean-a-flooded-mailbox — Erel Segal-Halevi, Jul 20 '15 at 12:13

score 486 · Answer 1 · edited May 30 '16 at 11:31

486

alternative way:

mail -N
d *
quit

-N Inhibits the initial display of message headers when reading mail or editing a mail folder.
d * delete all mails

edited May 30 '16 at 11:31

petermeissner

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answered Nov 17 '12 at 11:57

timaschew

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does not work on Debian 7. – karatedog Aug 07 '13 at 12:31
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If the mailbox file (/var/mail/) is too large, the mail command would take forever to load and might een fill up /tmp, resulting in failure. Much easier to just delete the aforementioned file. – Ethereal Dec 06 '13 at 14:10
4

It worked for me in nearly vanilla Debian 7.5. Alternatively one may want to delete all saved mails with simply typing `> mbox` in home directory, this just truncates mbox file. – Ciantic May 26 '14 at 15:48
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@andreas : just add it working successfully on CentOS 6.5. – Guillaume G. Aug 13 '14 at 14:43
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Also worked for me on Debian Wheezy (7.6) – Hayley Jan 18 '15 at 13:30
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working on Ubuntu 14.04 server – pupil Oct 09 '15 at 03:32
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Worked on Ubuntu 16.04 server – Spotlight May 08 '16 at 01:40
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Worked on CentOS 7 – vikas027 Oct 21 '16 at 00:03
Don't know how you got it to work on Centos 7. I'm on 7.1 and there is no `mail` command. – jcollum Jan 03 '17 at 17:00
Super answer. Thank you! CentOS 7 here. – PKHunter Feb 14 '17 at 08:11
best solution. Even the official instructions of -d ALL didn't work on my Ubuntu 16.04 – Koushik Das May 03 '17 at 02:56
If it doesn't work, do you write `quit`? Without it the result isn't saved, i.e. messages won't be deleted. – Leonid Mednikov Jun 05 '17 at 10:53
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@LeonidMednikov That's it! Typing `exit` instead of `quit` does not persist the delete. – rtaft Nov 28 '17 at 15:01
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Works on Debian 9.2 and as before stated, `quit` is important! – b4d Dec 05 '17 at 07:06
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that is the best answer (for Ubuntu users) – Mariusz Dec 29 '17 at 04:29
@Ethereal: I had this because somehow root got a mailbox of over 5GiB large and I was running out of disk space whilst loading said mailbox using the mail command. Sigkilled the mail command and manually deleted the file worked for me. – klaar Feb 14 '18 at 11:05

score 180 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 16 '11 at 09:38

180

You can simply delete the /var/mail/username file to delete all emails for a specific user. Also, emails that are outgoing but have not yet been sent will be stored in /var/spool/mqueue.

answered Aug 16 '11 at 09:38

EdoDodo

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The email at question which receive all cron emails is say cron_results@site.com. I just want to purge all the emails received on this email, leaving others intact. deleting the /var/www/username will delete all, right? – anjan Aug 16 '11 at 09:43
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`username` has to be replaced with the user for which you'd like to remove the emails. In your case, the emails are being sent to the user called `cron_results`, so you would have to delete `/var/www/cron_results`. – EdoDodo Aug 16 '11 at 09:51
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It is not a good praxis data manipulation from outside an application. If there is an option or command that can do the job, it is better to use it. As @timaschew answered, you can use the ‘d’ command inside the mail tool. – pocjoc Sep 03 '15 at 11:29
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Very practical when 'mail' only responds with 'Not enough memory - Aborted'. – Herbert Van-Vliet Nov 20 '18 at 10:19
Wow my mailbox was 36 GB (cronjob logs). Thanks that saved me a lot of time. – Harald Ernst Dec 03 '21 at 10:15
Another way is to type `> /var/spool/mail/root` – Robin Jan 30 '23 at 03:53

score 75 · Answer 3 · edited Jul 29 '14 at 21:47

75

Just use:

mail
d 1-15
quit

Which will delete all messages between number 1 and 15. to delete all, use the d *.

I just used this myself on ubuntu 12.04.4, and it worked like a charm.

For example:

eric@dev ~ $ mail
Heirloom Mail version 12.4 7/29/08.  Type ? for help.
"/var/spool/mail/eric": 2 messages 2 new
>N  1 Cron Daemon           Tue Jul 29 17:43  23/1016  "Cron <eric@ip-10-0-1-51> /usr/bin/php /var/www/sandbox/eric/c"
 N  2 Cron Daemon           Tue Jul 29 17:44  23/1016  "Cron <eric@ip-10-0-1-51> /usr/bin/php /var/www/sandbox/eric/c"
& d *
& quit

Then check your mail again:

eric@dev ~ $ mail
No mail for eric
eric@dev ~ $

What is tripping you up is you are using x or exit to quit which rolls back the changes during that session.

edited Jul 29 '14 at 21:47

Eric Leschinski

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answered Mar 03 '14 at 18:21

Mip

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There is no space between `d*`, at least on `CentOS 7`. – CodeMed Jan 09 '15 at 19:30
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Using `exit` rather than `quit` was tripping me up. `exit` will abort the session, so any emails pending deletion are left intact. `quit` will write the changes back, so deleted emails are committed at that point. – Jason Jul 08 '15 at 10:27
`d 1-15` works on Debian 8. Thanks! – tedi Apr 29 '17 at 03:06
Does not work in Red Hat. d 1-15 gives out 'Illegal numeric'. So does d *. – Salvador Valencia May 31 '17 at 22:58

score 28 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 25 '14 at 15:25

28

One liner:

echo 'd *' | mail -N

answered Aug 25 '14 at 15:25

Michael Munsey

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In HP-UX box, mail has no -N options. But, `yes 'd' | mail` works as expected. – Byoungchan Lee Jul 30 '18 at 03:31

score 26 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 29 '14 at 12:27

26

Rather than deleting, I think we can nullify the file, because the file will be created if the mail service is still on. Something like following will do the job

cat /dev/null >/var/spool/mail/tomlinuxusr

And yes, sorry for awakening this old thread but I felt I could contribute.

answered Apr 29 '14 at 12:27

xploreraj

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Also for the lazy, just typing this works too: >/var/spool/mail/unixuser – Salvador Valencia May 31 '17 at 23:15

score 9 · Answer 6 · answered Oct 27 '14 at 22:55

9

On UNIX / Linux / Mac OS X you can copy and override files, can't you? So how about this solution:

cp /dev/null /var/mail/root

answered Oct 27 '14 at 22:55

peter_pilgrim

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score 2 · Answer 7 · answered Mar 11 '15 at 14:08

If you're using cyrus/sasl/imap on your mailserver, then one fast and efficient way to purge everything in a mailbox that is older then number of days specified is to use cyrus/imap ipurge command. For example, here is an example removing everything (be carefull!!), older then 30 days from user vleo. Notice, that you must be logged in as cyrus (imap mail administrator) user:

[cyrus@mailserver ~]$ /usr/lib/cyrus-imapd/ipurge -f -d 30 user.vleo Working on user.vleo... total messages 4 total bytes 113183 Deleted messages 0 Deleted bytes 0 Remaining messages 4 Remaining bytes 113183

score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Sep 17 '14 at 15:05

1

Rather than use "d", why not "p". I am not sure if the "p *" will work. I didn't try that. You can; however use the following script"

#!/bin/bash
#

MAIL_INDEX=$(printf 'h a\nq\n' | mail | egrep -o '[0-9]* unread' | awk '{print $1}')

markAllRead=
for (( i=1; i<=$MAIL_INDEX; i++ ))
do
   markAllRead=$markAllRead"p $i\n"
done
markAllRead=$markAllRead"q\n"
printf "$markAllRead" | mail

answered Sep 17 '14 at 15:05

WSimpson

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For those who are curious, "p" is short for "print". – Isius Aug 25 '15 at 14:29

How do I purge a linux mail box with huge number of emails?

8 Answers8