Email Problems

I’ve got a problem, that my system administrator won’t help me with. My Trash folder on the server has grown to several gigabytes, and there is no way for me to empty it. It slows down getting and deleting mail, but Thunderbird crashes when I even try to load it. Here is the helpful email I got when I asked to simply delete it on the server (which I can’t do, because I don’t have root privileges–on my own hosted server).

“You’ll need to access your email accounts with a proper email client from your PC to clear them out. We can’t just delete the mail from the server, then the indexes are messed up. You need to be properly emptying your trash. 

You have multiple Gigs of mail in the trash folders on the Simberg account. “

Note that this is nothing I don’t know, except I don’t understand why it would mess up indexes to delete the trash. Is that true?

[Update a while later]

OK, Tbird crashes, but I seem to be able to access it from Evolution. But there is no obvious way to empty it, other than to Expunge, which seems a little drastic, but maybe that’s what I have to do. And it doesn’t load all of the headers; it gets stuck at 99%.

[Update a while later]

Well, I hit “Empty Trash” in Evolution, and it seems to have done the job (even though Evolution says it’s still working on it).

OK, Evolution thinks it’s finished now. My next problem is that it’s not properly displaying my inbox. But now my web interface is much more manageable.

18 thoughts on “Email Problems”

  1. Depending on the mail format used, yeah, it can cause trouble. Do you have shell access on the account at least? You don’t have to be root, the mail files will be using your UID, but you might have more luck deleting the trash using a command line mail client.

          1. Yeah chances are you won’t be able to get the software loaded onto the server because ftp will be blocked. wget using an http port might work. But the path of least resistance is to use mutt on your local machine. Shouldn’t be any worse that telling Evo or Tbird where your server is. Copy server info from them into where mutt wants the equivalent. Good Luck.

  2. I’d go with deskmerc’s recommendation. A CLI based mail client would be the best alternative if you can login via a user account on your server.

    A not so good alternative would be to fire up a 2nd mail client on your local machine, establish a connection (account) on that client to your server and start an empty-the-trash session there. Yeah it’ll be slow and yeah it may or may not allow you to fast access the server on your primary client. I suspect if you use a POP server it’ll really slow down everything regardless. An IMAP server maybe not. Would be worth a try.

    In the future set up your clients to empty your trash on a regular schedule. I make sure everything past 90 days gets deleted that I haven’t saved off to an archival folder.

  3. Just a guess since I don’t know how your server is set up, but you might see what shows up in /var/spool/mail.

      1. Try running evolution on the server under the shell and use the -help or –help switch. Might give you some clues on running it under a cli and how to attach locally to the server and delete your mail that way. Running it locally will go a hell of a lot faster than client/server over the net. It’s been years since I played with Evolution and I don’t have a Linux machine running right now @home. Or go with one of the CLI-based clients mentioned above. You may be able to use localhost: in place of a domainname or ip-address for the server entry to the client.

        1. Honestly, your hosting service should have been able to give you these solutions. Maybe you should consider another hosting service?

          1. It’s trying to send a mail I suspect. Hit CTRL-Z and see what happens. You’d need to invoke mutt with some switches to avoid this I suspect.

            Go with Evo and empty trash. It won’t load headers to do that IIRC. It’ll be slow but it should work.

  4. If you still have trouble deleting all your email, James Comey or Hillary Clinton could probably help you with it.

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