How to delete all or some emails from a mailbox without logging in to the mailbox on a Plesk server?

Dmitry Bystrov

12 months ago

Question

How to delete all or some emails from a mailbox without logging in to the mailbox?

Answer

Right now this feature is not implemented in Plesk. Please vote for it on our Plesk UserVoice portal: the most popular features are likely to be included in one of the next Plesk versions.

As a workaround, one of the following methods can be applied:

Delete the mailbox from the server and create it again - all emails will be removed;
Directly manipulate with Dovecot administrative utilities on a server:

Note: SSH access to the server is required.
Mailbox should be enabled: The "Mailbox" option is checked in Domains > example.com > Email Addresses > joedoe@example.com
- Get the information about existing mailboxes:
  
  # doveadm mailbox list -u user@example.com
  
  INBOX
  INBOX.Spam
  INBOX.Drafts
  INBOX.Trash
  INBOX.Sent
- Remove all messages older than a week from the 'Inbox' folder for the particular mailbox user@example.com:
  
  # doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox '*' before 1w
- Remove all messages older than a week from all folders except 'Inbox' folder for the particular mailbox user@example.com:
  
  # doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox INBOX.'*' before 1w
- Remove all messages from 'Drafts' folder on all example.com domain mailboxes:
  
  # for i in $(plesk bin mail -l | tr 't' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 3- | grep example.com); do doveadm expunge -u "$i" mailbox INBOX.Drafts all; done
- Delete all messages from the particular mailbox user@example.com:
  
  # doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox 'INBOX' all
  # doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox 'INBOX.*' all
- Remove all messages from 'Spam' and 'Trash' folders from all mailboxes on all domains:
  
  # for i in $(plesk bin mail -l | tr 't' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 3-); do doveadm expunge -u "$i" mailbox INBOX.Spam all; done
  # for i in $(plesk bin mail -l | tr 't' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 3-); do doveadm expunge -u "$i" mailbox INBOX.Trash all; done
  
  Note: courier-imap does not support these commands
- Also the procedure can be optimized by deleting all emails for all mailboxes specified in a file:
  - Download the following script and grant permissions:
    
    # wget https://github.com/plesk/kb-scripts/raw/master/mailbox-doveadm-expunge/mailbox-doveadm-expunge.sh && chmod +x ./mailbox-doveadm-expunge.sh
  - Edit/Create file mbox.txt and specify all mailboxes for you wish to remove emails from:
    
    johndoe@example.com
    ...
    jjohndoe2@example.org
  - Execute the script:
    
    # ./mailbox-doveadm-expunge.sh

More information on these features could be found in official Dovecot documentation articles:

Doveadm-Search-Query

Doveadm-Expunge

0 Shares