Re: deleting old mails

On Jun 3, 2007, at 8:05 AMJun 3, 2007, Thierry Lacoste wrote:

On Sunday 03 June 2007 14:01, Christopher Hilton wrote:
Thierry Lacoste wrote:
I'm running a postfix server on FreeBSD 6.1 and I'd like to have
a cronjob which deletes old mails from mboxes in /var/mail.

I tried mail/archivemail but it cannot create it's lock file
in /var/mail because it runs as the user owning the mailbox
on which it operates.

I also tried mail/archmbox but I'm wondering if it is safe
to use it while postfix is running. Quoting the manual:

A few words about locking. There has been a discussion about
archmbox handles file locking. The answer is simple: no mailbox is ever
locked. The reason behind this behavior is that I want archmbox to be as
least invasive as possible, so other kind of checks are performed to
ensure that no data is lost (mailbox has changed/mailbox is in use by
another program). I will surely add some locking mechanism in the future.

Any help would be appreciated.

Have you consider using Maildir/ format instead? A switch to Maildir/
format would allow you to use the "find" program to weed out your
mailbox and locking is not an issue.

AFAICS the Maildir/ format implies that mails are delivered to the home
directory of the users.
On the mail server the home diretory is NFS-mounted read-only just to
be able to see the .forward files.
Users are required to use only pops to read their mail (qpopper is on the
mail server) and I wanted to avoid unnecessary network traffic: from the
mail server to the NFS server upon mail receipt and in the other way when
readind mail with pops.


That's not true. My particular mail system saves to a mail-specific directory, under /usr/local. Not in the user's home directory.

If you're worried about disk space, try enabling quotas in your postfix configuration. There's a great postfix how to at www.purplehat.org to help you set all this up. Personally, I don't try to tell users what email they can have, I just limit their space - they'll decide what's important and what's not.

However, maildir is the way to go if you want to search for delete certain mail.

HTH.

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