How to clean a flooded mailbox

Question

Today I opened my university mailbox, after several months of not opening it. I found it is flooded with about 300 K messages from the cron daemon, notifying me of a certain unimportant warning in a certain cron job. I stopped that cron job immediately, but now I am stuck with a huge mailbox and cannot find the important messages (if any).

I would like to automatically delete all the messages sent by the cron daemon (but not the other messages). How can I do this?

If this helps: there is pine installed on that server, in addition to the standard Unix tools.

Check if this answers your query? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7076186/how-do-i-purge-a-linux-mail-box-with-huge-number-of-emails — Munai Das Udasin, Jul 20 '15 at 10:03
@MunaiDasUdasin the answers to that question suggest to delete the entire mailbox, not only the cron messages. — Erel Segal-Halevi, Jul 20 '15 at 12:13
pine is the worst choice, because it re-reads the entire mailbox once per minute. — Simon Richter, Jul 20 '15 at 14:44

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 20 '15 at 10:41

One way to do it would be to install mutt. With mutt you can delete messages matching various criteria, f.i. messages from the cron daemon. It might be a good idea to copy a representative sample of messages in some other folder and practice the operation there before running the cleanup against your inbox.

If you're doing this over IMAP you might also send a note to your sysadmin that you're going to delete 300k messages, otherwise he might be at your door with a baseball bat before the operation is finished. :)

How to clean a flooded mailbox

1 Answers1