Emptying Trash with Dovecot IMAP

Question

On a Debian Squeeze system I run an IMAP server using Dovecot with messages being stored in the Maildir format. The server is accessed by various clients, including Thunderbird, Evolution and RoundCube.

When a user deletes a message it is moved to the Trash folder. (I am unsure if all clients also mark the messages as deleted when moving them.) However, beyond that no action is taken. Hence I am forced to periodically remind all users to explicitly empty their Trash every few months.

Does Dovecot provide an easy means of automatically deleting Trashed messages older than n days? I've seen mention to an expunge cron-job but it seems to delete all messages older than a certain number of days as opposed to just those in Trash.

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 06 '15 at 17:36

8

The Plugin that @hostemaster mentioned is not really needed if you don't deal with thousand of users.

Just create an easy script like this:

#!/bin/bash
#
DOVEADM="/usr/local/dovecot/bin/doveadm";

$DOVEADM expunge -A mailbox Trash savedbefore 90d
$DOVEADM expunge -A mailbox Junk  savedbefore 60d

And run it daily as an cronjob.

This will remove all messages from Trash that are older than 90 days, or from Junk if older than 60 days.

answered Jun 06 '15 at 17:36

Matthias Dunkel

213
3
7

Is that verbatim? "mailbox" isn't a placeholder or anything? And that will go through every user's folders? – DevOpsSauce Jun 25 '21 at 17:13
@DevOpsSauce https://doc.dovecot.org/3.0/man/doveadm-expunge.1/ – Serrano May 07 '23 at 19:24

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 01 '11 at 12:41

2

Expire plugin delete mails from specified mailboxes after a designated number of days. http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/Expire

answered Apr 01 '11 at 12:41

hostmaster

553
2
6

That plugin just optimizes the existing process when you have thousands of users. It does not itself expunge old messages. – simpleuser Sep 24 '15 at 12:51

Emptying Trash with Dovecot IMAP

2 Answers2