Deleting a large volume of spam

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philadcock
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Apr 19, 2017 11:31 am

Deleting a large volume of spam

Post by philadcock »

Hi - I have a malleable server that has been hit with spam and I'm trying to find an efficient way to prune mailboxes. I have a bunch of mailboxes (10 or so) with between 30-60K messages. My challenge is to remove the noise but keep the valid messages.

The issue I have is that accessing the mailboxes via webmail is incredibly slow - selecting and deleting 1000 messages can take an hour and the interface will often time out. Loading a mailbox into an IMAP client and deleting the messages that way isn't working too well either. Again, it looks like I'm experiencing some sort of timeout - if I try and delete 1000 messages the client will successfully delete some but not all. I was expecting this to be a server resource issue, but surprisingly there is CPU and memory spare when I try to delete messages.

Is there a better way of selecting an pruning mailboxes with large numbers of messages?

I'm running v9.7.

Thanks!

Phil.

MailEnable-Ian
Site Admin
Posts: 9738
Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2004 4:44 am
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Re: Deleting a large volume of spam

Post by MailEnable-Ian »

Hi,

The first step is to update the server to version 9.72 as it contains fixes to IMAP that you need to apply. Once you have upgraded connect via IMAP to the mailbox and try to delete the messages as there has been a lot of speed improvements to the IMAP service in this area.

You may also want to consider upgrading to Professional or Enterprise edition as they now provide an archiving and purge wizard which allows messages in a folder to be archived or purged based on subject or sender criteria.
Regards,

Ian Margarone
MailEnable Support

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