How to delete emails older than x days

[triangledigital]

I used the method in this message to delete old Trash and Spam. It seemed to work:

Can I use cron to delete old spam and trashed mail?

I have several users that don’t seem willing/able to clear out their Spam and Trash folders. Most access their email via POP and so their inboxes are being cleared, but their Spam folders now have several months’ worth of spam. I would like to run these this bash script once per day, using crontab. #!/bin/bash cd /home/user-data/mail/mailboxes find -wholename "./*/*/.Spam/*/*.box.example.com*" -mtime +60 -exec rm {} \; find -wholename "./*/*/.Trash/*/*.box.example.com*" -mtime +60 -exec rm {} …

However, this link shows a method using dovecot itself. I have not tried it.

doveadm: Delete messages older than date

It seems to me that the latter should be better. Am I right?

[StevevonSheff]

To activate auto delete trash edit this file:

./etc/dovecot/conf.d/15-mailboxes.conf

Change by adding autoexpunge = 30d. e.g.:

namespace {
mailbox Junk {
special_use = \Junk
auto = subscribe
autoexpunge = 30d
}

mailbox Trash {
special_use = \Trash
auto = subscribe
autoexpunge = 30d
}
}

In this case anything older than 30 days is purged. But it won’t have any affect on mails that are already in the trash/spam folders, only ones deleted going forward.

p.s. This needs to be applied again if mail-in-a-box is updated.