- Delete all mails from inbox using linux command prompt
- Delete all mails from inbox using linux command prompt
- Delete a range of email messages using the ‘mail’ command
- Need to delete mails for a range of dates in Linux
- Delete Mail Based on Subject Pattern [mail-command]
- Mutt Cheat Sheet – How to delete all message in Mutt
- How to configure Mutt to use Maildir
- Why delete all messages?
- Steps to delete all messages
- “You have mail” – How to Read Mail in Linux Command Line
- View Spool File
- Delete Spool File
- Using the mail Program
- Delete All Messages using mail
Delete all mails from inbox using linux command prompt
Solution 2: If you want to execute a through , you could generate that sequence of commands and pipe it directly to : Solution 3: The following will help you to read the mails during 1 second, delete the mail and move on to the next one. According to «man mail» there are plenty of different patterns to specify the messages on which the command like «d» for deletion will work on.
Delete all mails from inbox using linux command prompt
How can I delete emails from an individual email account? e.g. how can I empty userxyz@mydomain.com?
/var/spool/mail/mydomain /var/mail/mydomain
I have many inboxes some of them contain important email I don’t want to delete.
I tried delete all data in user mail cur/ and new/ in the following folder but when checked user quota still was the same.
Just to let you know I’m using CentOS.
If you have a mail client like mutt available you can open those files directly like so:
It may prompt you to create the following folder, $HOME/Mail , just say no ( n ) to this question.
/root/Mail does not exist. Create it? ([yes]/no):
You’ll then be able to use t to tag any emails you don’t want to keep. Once they’ve been tagged type the letter d to delete them.
Then simply exit mutt when you’re done, q .
Email — Need to delete mails for a range of dates in Linux, You can delete a range of messages with a command like d 1-42 (delete the first 42 messages). If you want more control, I recommend Mutt, a command line email client that gives you a lot more control than the mail command. Mutt has a text mode interface and can also be scripted. In Mutt, you …
Delete a range of email messages using the ‘mail’ command
I have about 1k+ mails in an inbox (old cronjob stdout). How do I delete them in bulk?
I’m on Solaris 8 and I have only mail available, no pine or mutt or similar «UI»-based client.
Inline help and man page only give d # to delete a specific mail. I’ve tried for example d 1 — 100 but no luck. And I don’t feel like doing d 1000 times.
Any ideas how to clean up this inbox? I’d actually like to purge all mails older than x days.
While mail may not be able to, and you don’t have pine or mutt you probably do have mailx . And mailx can d 5-10 or d * .
If you want to execute a d 1 through d 100 , you could generate that sequence of commands and pipe it directly to mail :
i=1; while [ $i -le 100 ]; do echo d $i; i=$(($i+1)); done | mail
The following will help you to read the mails during 1 second, delete the mail and move on to the next one. If all mails have been deleted loop will stop.
Want some more time? Change sleep to 2 or more. Want it faster? Replace sleep 1 by a dummy command.
while (echo dq |mail) do sleep 1 ;done
Email — How do I delete all mail coming from a specific, I need help to find the right command to delete all mail in a specific user’s inbox coming from specific domains (spam mail from @qq.com or @sohu.com») Stack Exchange Network Stack Exchange network consists of 180 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online …
Need to delete mails for a range of dates in Linux
I have 1 million mails generated in a Linux sever due to a cron job. I want to delete the mails, but not all as this cron mails useful to troubleshoot and find out the issue with cron job’s execution. So I need to keep 1 month’s mail and remove the remaining.
There are many different mail commands out there with different command sets. POSIX standardizes a mailx command.
Your mailbox will typically contain emails in the order in which they were received. So to delete older mails, you would typically delete lower-numbered emails. You can delete a range of messages with a command like d 1-42 (delete the first 42 messages).
If you want more control, I recommend Mutt, a command line email client that gives you a lot more control than the mail command. Mutt has a text mode interface and can also be scripted. In Mutt, you can use the command D to mark messages for deletion and enter the pattern ~d ->1m to select messages that are more than 1 month old. If you’re satisfied with the list of messages to delete, type x to delete the messages marked for deletion.
After a lot of searching I found archivemail using which was able to clear old mails.
(In usual cases $MAIL defines the local mailbox location, try echo $MAIL to check).
You can also check what it is going to do with the -n ( —dry-run ) option.
I’ve been struggling with this same issue for a while, and Googling for a simple answer was tougher than expected for the mail server I’m administering.
I needed to delete mail from a single user’s mailbox which was regularly filling up the filesystem and ended up with the following cron job:
18 5 * * * /usr/bin/mutt -f /var/spool/mail/developer -e "push D~d>7dqy"
Or: at 05:18 every day, run mutt on file (directory in this case) /var/spool/mail/developer, wait until mutt is up (push), mark for deletion (D) patterns matching (~) date (d) older than 7 days (>7d), to conclude that command, then quit (q) and confirm deletion (y)
mutt can delete using regular expressions, details here and here.
Delete Mail Based on Subject Pattern [mail-command], Use another mail program, e.g. mutt: D to delete all messages matching a pattern, and you can more generally and flexible tag messages according to your needs, and then apply some action to them. – dirkt
Delete Mail Based on Subject Pattern [mail-command]
Is it possible to delete all mail in which the subject matches a regex pattern?
But to delete all mail with subject starting with, say, [SPAM] , I can’t do:
I am answering this in case anyone comes by the same question.
It does not appear there is any way to do bulk deletion by pattern matching using mail . An alternative is to use the mutt mail client, which does have such feature:
Thanks to @thrig and @dirkt for suggesting the alternative.
According to «man mail» there are plenty of different patterns to specify the messages on which the command like «d» for deletion will work on. For the asked subject line, you can use
(subject string) All messages that contain string in the Subject: field.
This will delete every mail that has the string «Happy Birthday» in its subject. There are also patterns for other fields and different date related criterions (It was tested with «heirloom mail version 12.4 7/29/08.»)
I was looking for the same without success, so I decided to try like this:
echo 'f 1-$' | mail -N | grep 'SPAM' | awk ''
Or print $0 to see the full header to show the mail number with the string ‘SPAM’.
So if you think is ok you can delete all of this.
Mail — Unix, Linux Command, Causes the delete command to behave like dp — thus, after deleting a message, the next one will be typed automatically. debug: Setting the binary option debug is the same as specifying -d on the command line and causes mail to output all sorts of information useful for debugging mail. dot
Mutt Cheat Sheet – How to delete all message in Mutt
One might ask why use a terminal based email client when such a wealth of highly feature rich web based email client software already exists? Let me give you one reason: As a server administrator, you need to see messages sent to root. Often on a dedicated or VPS hosted service, the operating system will spurn messages to [email protected] if it deems the messages to be important. These critical messages often contain extremely valuable troubleshooting information that will be found nowhere else.
How to configure Mutt to use Maildir
Mutt relies on a file called ~/.muttrc
If Mutt was started and defaulted to the wrong format, you can reconfigure it by creating a new ~/.muttrc file with chmod 600 permissions. The contents of the file should be this:
set mbox_type=Maildir set spoolfile="~/Maildir/" set folder="~/Maildir/" set mask=".*" set record="+.Sent" set postponed="+.Drafts" # Generate mailboxes for each maildir subdir mailboxes ! + `\ for file in ~/Maildir/.*; do \ box=$(basename "$file"); \ if [ ! "$box" = '.' -a ! "$box" = '..' -a ! "$box" = '.customflags' \ -a ! "$box" = '.subscriptions' ]; then \ echo -n "\"+$box\" "; \ fi; \ done` # Marcos to display folder list when changing maildir folders macro index c "?" "open a different folder" macro pager c "?" "open a different folder" # Macros to display folder list when copying/moving messages macro index C "?" "copy a message to a mailbox" macro index M "?" "move a message to a mailbox"
Why delete all messages?
System generated error and other message sent to Mutt will build up over time. If you don’t log in regularly and clean up, you might end up with thousands of messages eventually.
Emails messages to root can be transient, and only really important when they happen. When you have 1000s it’s impossible to focus on the most important ones.
This article will help you to solve the problem of deleting many messages at once.
Steps to delete all messages
Press SHIFT-D (uppercase d). The status bar of mutt should show:
Type in ~s .* in the status bar and press enter
Press q to quit, and then y to confirm the deletion of all messages.
“You have mail” – How to Read Mail in Linux Command Line
This message indicates that there is a message in your spool file. Usually the spool file is in a very simple mbox format, so you can open it in a text viewer like less or with the mail program. In most cases, this is not a message from a long lost lover, but instead a system message generated by your Linux mail service. (sad)
View Spool File
Use the following command to read the mail for the currently logged in user. The $(whoami) variable returns the currently logged in user.
You can use the ↑ and ↓ arrows on your keyboard to scroll through the spool file.
Press uppercase G to scroll to the bottom of the file and lowercase q to quit.
If you wish to read another user’s mail, just enter their user name.
Delete Spool File
You can simply delete the /var/mail/username file to delete all emails for a specific user. The $(whoami) variable returns the currently logged in user.
Using the mail Program
You can also use the mail program to easily list and view messages in your spool file. If mail is not installed, you can install it with sudo apt install mailutils .
Messages will be listed with a corresponding number:
mail "/var/mail/john": 6 messages 6 new >N 1 Mail Delivery Syst Thu Feb 15 21:12 80/2987 Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender N 2 Mail Delivery Syst Fri Feb 16 00:09 71/2266 Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender N 3 Mail Delivery Syst Fri Feb 16 00:16 71/2266 Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender N 4 Mail Delivery Syst Fri Feb 16 00:21 71/2266 Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender N 5 Mail Delivery Syst Fri Feb 16 00:22 71/2266 Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender N 6 Mail Delivery Syst Fri Feb 16 00:24 75/2668 Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender ?
After the ? prompt, enter the number of the mail you want to read and press ENTER .
Press ENTER to scroll through the message line by line and press q and ENTER to return to the message list.
To exit mail , type q at the ? prompt and then press ENTER .
Delete All Messages using mail
To delete all messages using mail, after the ? prompt, type d * and press ENTER .
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