How do I delete 50,000 spam e-mails from a user's inbox?

Question

I've tried setting up Thunderbird and doing it in chunks but the client can't handle more than a few hundred at a time or it will hang.
The web client will only allow us to select 50 at a time.
Is there a way I can get in on the server side and delete e-mails that have a common string? Is there an easier way?
Thanks.
Edited by: brad84 on Feb 28, 2008 8:30 AM

Answer 1

edepas wrote:
At the messaging server, run hashdir <username>. This will show the subdirectory under your message store that you should cd to in order to get to your user's mailbox (for example 11/22). For instance, with a single-partition, primary-only store, the message store would be located at <msg-srvr-base>/data/store/partition/primary/=user. Then the user's mailbox would be at <msg-srvr-base>/data/store/partition/primary/=user/11/22. To get to the mail folders, just cd =<username>.An easier way I find to determine the path of a mailbox is to do the following:
./mboxutil -lxp user/<uid>/<mailbox>e.g.
# ./mboxutil -lxp user/user001/INBOX
  msgs  Kbytes last msg         partition   quotaroot mailbox path and acl
     0       0 2008/02/06 02:33 primary         10240 user/user001/INBOX /opt/SUNWmsgsr/data/store/partition/primary/=user/60/d6/=user001 user001 lrswipcda
Once in the mail folders, run an rm -r on the spam folder. You'd need to re-create the spam folder, perhaps using an IMAP connection. If you want to find and remove emails that contain a certain header string, you can do this by using the imexpire utility. For example if you had emails with "Subject: Reminder notice for XYZ event" you would do the following:
1. Create a file with the rule to remove the messages:
cat /tmp/delete.rule
Rule1.regexp: 1
Rule1.folderpattern: user/.*/INBOX
Rule1.Subject: Reminder notice for XYZ event
2. Run the rule in debug mode for the user to confirm it will delete the emails
./imexpire -n -d -v3 -u <username> -f /tmp/delete.rule
e.g.
# ./imexpire -n -d -v3 -u user001 -f /tmp/delete.rule
loading ExpireRule: Rule1
        FolderPattern: user/.*/INBOX
        Subject: Reminder notice for XYZ event
        Action: discard
user/[email protected]/INBOX: exists (1) largest (564) oldest (1204257435) qused (564)
applying ExpireRule: user/[email protected]/INBOX
        Subject: Reminder notice for XYZ event
        Action: discard
deleting user/user001/INBOX UID 100
user/user001/INBOX: deleted 1 messages
3. Once you are happy that the imexpire is behaving correctly, run the same command without the "-n" option.
In the case of spamassassin, the spam folder gets created automatically by the spam filtering software itself.Just to clarify -- it is actually the "fileinto:" sieve filter action in the messaging server option.dat configuration file that causes the emails to get posted into the spam folder. If the spam folder doesn't exist Messaging Server creates it.
Regards,
Shane.