OT: Removing 14 day old messages, my script...

[Matt Juszczak]

Hi all,

I've created the following script to remove 14 day old messages.

expunge-check.pl (not shown here, but CALLED from the script below) takes 
a single email messages on STDIN and then checks whether the date of that 
message is 14 days old or greater.  If it is, it skips it.  If it is NOT, 
it writes it to a file.  So at the end of the formmail -s call below, 
there is now a Spam.tmp file in $HOME/mail for the user.  The script below 
then moves that file to their productive Spam folder, and it moves onto 
the next user.

I wish there was an easier way to do this.  Instead of creating a 
NEW file with just the messages we have to keep, I wish that we could just 
remove the specific mail message from the actual Spam folder (maybe by 
passing the From: or the message itself possibly).  That way, we wouldn't 
have to do moving, chowning, and a bunch of locking (and I know I'm not 
locking with flock below either, which is also a problem).

With 3000 users, the script below takes all day to run, about 2 minutes 
per user.  Reason being is it has to go through ALL messages, even if they 
are 3 days old, because it has to write those to a separate file.

Is there an easier way to do this?

Thanks!

-Matt



--- begin snip ---

for x in `ls /home/*/mail/Spam`
do
         USERNAME=`echo $x | awk -F'/' '{ print $3 }'`;
         SIZE=`du $x | awk -F' ' '{ print $1 }'`;
         if [ "$SIZE" -lt "5120" ]
         then
                 echo "Skipping $USERNAME ($SIZE)";
         else
                 echo "Analyzing $USERNAME ($SIZE)";

                 # Remove existing Spam.tmp
                 if [ -f "/home/$USERNAME/mail/Spam.tmp" ]
                 then
                         rm /home/$USERNAME/mail/Spam.tmp;
                 fi

                 # Create locks
                 touch /home/$USERNAME/mail/Spam.lock

                 # Call Formmail recursively
                 formail -s /usr/local/mailclean/expunge-check.pl $USERNAME < $x

                 # Remove locks
                 rm /home/$USERNAME/mail/Spam.lock

                 # Move Spam.tmp and CHOWN!
                 if [ -f "/home/$USERNAME/mail/Spam.tmp" ]
                 then
                         mv /home/$USERNAME/mail/Spam.tmp /home/$USERNAME/mail/Spam;
                         chown $USERNAME:users /home/$USERNAME/mail/Spam;
                 fi
         fi
done;