Deleting All Catch-All Mails Across All Accounts

arsytym

• January 21, 2015 13:37

Hi, I need to empty all my catch-all accounts, I have many to do which will take a long time manually I already set the catch-all to : Fail to prevent more mail coming in, I have probably over 1 million emails in total collectively in these accounts, some have over 200k so trying to remove cur folder times out. Any ideas what to run with SSH to do this in bulk? Thank you

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  24x7server

  • January 22, 2015 07:25

  Hello, You will have to delete all mail using SSH from cur and new directory which are created under /home/username/mail directory

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  cPanelMichael

  • January 22, 2015 12:59

  Hello :) Email sent to the default address is stored in:
  /home/$username/mail/cur /home/$username/mail/new
  You can delete all of this email through the use of a wildcard and the "rm" command. There is no single command to use, but you could try something such as:
  mkdir /root/email-to-delete mv /home/*/mail/cur/* /root/email-to-delete/ mv /home/*/mail/new/* /root/email-to-delete/
  Then, simply delete "/root/email-to-delete" when you have confirmed the emails are no longer required. To note, you can ensure emails sent to non-existent email accounts are not delivered to the default address by ensuring your accounts set the "Default Address" to: "Discard with error to sender (at SMTP time)" Thank you.

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  arsytym

  • January 26, 2015 03:27

  Hello, Thank you for replying to my question. I ran the command, mv /home/*/mail/cur/* /root/email-to-delete/ But I received This: -bash: /bin/mv: Argument list too long I have set all existing account to :fail now - just need to clear out these folders :)

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  cPanelMichael

  • January 27, 2015 19:42

  You may find this third-party application helpful if you lack command-line experience: Config Server Mail Manage Otherwise, searching for "/bin/mv: Argument list too long" on a search engine will yield useful results. Thank you.

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  ethical

  • May 02, 2016 15:05

  just wanted to save others the time in "searching for the answer" as Michael suggested use
  find /home/*/mail/cur/* -type f | xargs -i mv "{}" /root/email-to-delete/ or this and slowly increase the mtime value until you can finish with the above line find /home/*/mail/cur/* -type f -mtime +1 -print | xargs -i{} mv {} /root/email-to-delete/
  in my cause my list was even too long for the find command, even when i set it to just do files modified in the lastday (-mtime +1) so i did this and stepped through the alphabet for the home dirs util I could run the above command without error
  find /home/a*/mail/new/* -type f -print | xargs -i{} mv {} /root/email-to-delete/
  

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