Delete a range of email messages using the 'mail' command

Question

I have about 1k+ mails in an inbox (old cronjob stdout). How do I delete them in bulk?

I'm on Solaris 8 and I have only mail available, no pine or mutt or similar "UI"-based client.

Inline help and man page only give d # to delete a specific mail. I've tried for example d 1 - 100 but no luck. And I don't feel like doing d 1000 times.

Any ideas how to clean up this inbox? I'd actually like to purge all mails older than x days.

score 24 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 11 '12 at 18:05

24

While mail may not be able to, and you don't have pine or mutt you probably do have mailx. And mailx can d 5-10 or d *.

answered Aug 11 '12 at 18:05

bahamat

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`mail` on macOS also supports ranges. `d 1-100` works. – Calvin Huang Mar 17 '23 at 17:18

Jim Paris · Answer 2 · 2012-08-12T21:14:06.640

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If you want to execute a d 1 through d 100, you could generate that sequence of commands and pipe it directly to mail:

i=1; while [ $i -le 100 ]; do echo d $i; i=$(($i+1)); done | mail

edited Aug 12 '12 at 21:14

answered Aug 12 '12 at 05:00

Jim Paris

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I have no Solaris here to check. If you run `d 1`, does it renumber subsequent emails? If so, you need to either loop backwards or run `d 1` 100 times. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Aug 12 '12 at 20:55
It does not appear to renumber until all the commands have been run, so `do echo "d $i"` seems correct. – Mike Godin Jan 25 '22 at 20:23

score 2 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 30 '13 at 13:43

2

The following will help you to read the mails during 1 second, delete the mail and move on to the next one. If all mails have been deleted loop will stop.

Want some more time? Change sleep to 2 or more. Want it faster? Replace sleep 1 by a dummy command.

while (echo dq |mail) do sleep 1 ;done

edited Apr 30 '13 at 13:43

slm

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answered Apr 30 '13 at 13:25

Geert

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Delete a range of email messages using the 'mail' command

3 Answers3