Thread: How do I delete thousands of e-mail messages with cPanel

How do I delete thousands of e-mail messages with cPanel or Horde's webmail interface?

If you surfing in a website, you may get one day that you have a mail account containing thousands of messages. This is occurs is because the default e-mail account is set up as a "catch-all" address. This will direct all e-mail sent to wrong usernames at your domain to the default Inbox. Because spammers send out spam messages to invalid e-mail addresses all the time, the number of e-mails received by the default mailbox can raise by thousands of messages every day.

The solution for to stop this unwanted mails. After that select the option that says "Discard with error to sender". This will bounce all unwanted e-mails back to the sender and will keep the messages from support up in your default mailbox. Over time, this can help save several hard disk space on your server.

You fixed this problem after thousands of messages had already comes in your default e-mail account's Inbox. In my case it was over 500,000 messages. I understand that deleting these messages one page at a time through the Horde webmail interface would take a moment. So I figured there must be some simplest technique to delete the messages.

Just follow these basic steps:

1. Log into the Horde Mail system.
2. Click the "Folders" icon at the top of the window.
3. Check the box next to "Inbox" or the mailbox that contains the messages you would like to delete.
4. From the "Choose Action:" drop-down menu, choose "Empty Folder(s)."
5. You will be prompted to confirm the action, as it is not undoable.
6. Click "Empty Selected Folders" to clean out the mailbox.

Depending on how many messages are stored in your Inbox, this process may take some seconds to quite a few minutes to complete. The only catch is that if the mailbox contains a lot of messages, the process will time out and will not empty the mailbox.

If this is also your circumstances, you may have to delete the message folders yourself. To perform this, you will first require to navigate to the mail folder, which is placed in the following directory:

/home/username/mail/ (where "username" is the username for the mail account)