Expunging expired Junk and Trash emails with dovecot

December 4, 2020 by Roberto Puzzanghera 18 comments

Of course we want to delete old Junk and Trash emails to save hard disk space.

If you want to expunge your Junk and Trash folder after 60 days you can set 15-mailboxes.conf as follows:

namespace {
  mailbox Junk {
    special_use = \Junk
    auto = subscribe
    autoexpunge = 60d
  }

  mailbox Trash {
    special_use = \Trash
    auto = subscribe
    autoexpunge = 60d
  }
}

Be aware that the messages saved to Inbox 60 days ago and moved to Junk today will not be deleted.

In case you need to act more precisely on your mailboxes you may want to take a look at this script by Tony Fung.

I leave intact these following notes for those who are not satisfied with the previous method and prefer to set up an expunge script to be run via cronjob. Those who set up the autoexpunge as explained above can jump to the next page.

This command

doveadm expunge -A mailbox Junk savedbefore 60d

will do a connection to the userdb, sql/MySQL in our case, and iterate in all (-A option) user's mailbox looking for expired emails, moved to the Junk folder more than 60 days ago.

To achieve the purpose it will be sufficient to create a shell script like this

> nano /usr/local/dovecot/etc/dovecot_expunge.sh

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

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

assign the +x priviledge:

chmod +x /usr/local/dovecot/etc/dovecot_expunge.sh

and run the script once a month or whatever as a cronjob

> crontab -e

# dovecot delete spam & trash
#minute hour mday month wday command
40 3 12 * * /usr/local/dovecot/etc/dovecot_expunge.sh

What to do when using the vpopmail auth driver

Unfortunately, the vpopmail's APIs seem not to provide an iteration feature. The good news is that Costel Balta has a brilliant solution. You can download his script here.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Author: Costel Balta
# Slightly modified by Roberto Puzzanghera
#

# Config and executables path  
VPOPMAIL_MYSQL_CONFIG="/home/vpopmail/etc/vpopmail.mysql"  

# mysql bin
MYSQL=$(which mysql)

# Extract mysql params  
HOST=$(sed -n "/#/! s/^\(.*\)|.*|.*|.*|.*/\1/p" $VPOPMAIL_MYSQL_CONFIG)  
PORT=$(sed -n "/#/! s/^.*|\(.*\)|.*|.*|.*/\1/p" $VPOPMAIL_MYSQL_CONFIG)  
USER=$(sed -n "/#/! s/^.*|.*|\(.*\)|.*|.*/\1/p" $VPOPMAIL_MYSQL_CONFIG)  
 PWD=$(sed -n "/#/! s/^.*|.*|.*|\(.*\)|.*/\1/p" $VPOPMAIL_MYSQL_CONFIG)  
  DB=$(sed -n "/#/! s/^.*|.*|.*|.*|\(.*\)/\1/p" $VPOPMAIL_MYSQL_CONFIG) 

# dovecot details
DOVEADM="/usr/local/dovecot/bin/doveadm";

# Output sql to a file that we want to run
echo "USE vpopmail; select concat(pw_name,'@',pw_domain) as username from vpopmail;" > /tmp/query.sql;

# Run the query and get the results (adjust the path to mysql)
results=`$MYSQL -h $HOST -u $USER -p$PWD -N < /tmp/query.sql`;

# Loop through each row
for row in $results
        do
        echo "Purging $row Trash and Junk mailbox..."
        # Purge expired Trash
        $DOVEADM -v expunge mailbox Trash -u "$row" savedbefore 90d
        # Purge expired Junk
        $DOVEADM -v expunge mailbox Junk  -u "$row" savedbefore 60d
done

This script does a mysql query selecting all users from the vpopmail's database, stores the results in a variable and iterates through each user's mailbox deleting old emails from Trash and Junk folders. Since this script stores the mysql access it must be run by root and must have root's read priviledges.

If you want to avoid email notifications about this task, because you have tons of users, simply comment the echo inside the script.

cd /usr/local/dovecot/etc
wget https://notes.sagredo.eu/files/qmail/dovecot_expunge/dovecot_expunge-cb
mv dovecot_expire dovecot_expire.sh
chown root:root dovecot_expire.sh
chmod 0700 /usr/local/dovecot/etc/dovecot_expire.sh

Run the script once a month or whatever as a cronjob

> crontab -e

# dovecot delete spam & trash
#minute hour mday month wday command
40 3 12 * * /usr/local/dovecot/etc/dovecot_expire.sh

Indexing

vpopmail-auth driver removal

dovecot

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Comments

mysql: [Warning]

Bai Borko October 4, 2024 13:20 CET

Hi Roberto,

when i execute /usr/local/dovecot/etc/dovecot expire.sh manually in the output there is below warning:

mysql: [Warning] Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.

I created small patch for it:

cat > /usr/local/src/dovecot_expire.patch <<__EOF__
--- /usr/local/dovecot/etc/dovecot_expire.sh.old 2024-10-04 11:48:15.436321335 +0000
+++ /usr/local/dovecot/etc/dovecot_expire.sh 2024-10-04 11:49:36.847198893 +0000
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
echo "USE vpopmail; select concat(pw_name,'@',pw_domain) as username from vpopmail;" > /tmp/query.sql;

# Run the query and get the results (adjust the path to mysql)
-results=`$MYSQL -h $HOST -u $USER -p$PWD -N < /tmp/query.sql`;
+results=`export MYSQL_PWD=$PWD; $MYSQL -h $HOST -u $USER -N < /tmp/query.sql`;

# Loop through each row
for row in $results
__EOF__

For all with already enabled dovecot_expire.sh cron can apply the patch:

patch /usr/local/dovecot/etc/dovecot_expire.sh < /usr/local/src/dovecot_expire.patch

Expunging expired Junk and Trash emails with dovecot

What to do when using the vpopmail auth driver

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