deleting old mails

[Thierry Lacoste]

On Sunday 03 June 2007 14:01, Christopher Hilton wrote:
> Thierry Lacoste wrote:
> > I'm running a postfix server on FreeBSD 6.1 and I'd like to have
> > a cronjob which deletes old mails from mboxes in /var/mail.
> >
> > I tried mail/archivemail but it cannot create it's lock file
> > in /var/mail because it runs as the user owning the mailbox
> > on which it operates.
> >
> > I also tried mail/archmbox but I'm wondering if it is safe
> > to use it while postfix is running. Quoting the manual:
> >
> >        A few words about locking. There has been a discussion  about 
> > archmbox handles  file locking. The answer is simple: no mailbox is ever
> > locked. The reason behind this behavior is that I want archmbox to be as 
> > least invasive  as  possible, so other kind of checks are performed to
> > ensure that no data is lost (mailbox has changed/mailbox is in use by 
> > another program). I will surely add some locking mechanism in the future.
> >
> > Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Have you consider using Maildir/ format instead? A switch to Maildir/
> format would allow you to use the "find" program to weed out your
> mailbox and locking is not an issue.

AFAICS the Maildir/ format implies that mails are delivered to the home
directory of the users.
On the mail server the home diretory is NFS-mounted read-only just to
be able to see the .forward files.
Users are required to use only pops to read their mail (qpopper is on the
mail server) and I wanted to avoid unnecessary network traffic: from the
mail server to the NFS server upon mail receipt and in the other way when
readind mail with pops.

Regards,
Thierry.