Without thinking about it, for the last 6 months, I had my email client leaving messages on the server after they're downloaded. Well, now I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 72,000 emails sitting on the server and checking email takes 5+ minutes while the client sorts through all the messages on the server (at least that's what I think is the problem). And even though I set it to delete messages from server after downloading, it's not. Is there any way to delete messages that have been downloaded (on the server side)?

I prefer to not have to delete the whole queue, as there's new messages in there that I need.

FYI, my server's running on RedHat. Plesk.

KMR

There is a Status: flag in the header of each email message indicating whether it is read or not.

Status: O indicates not read.

Status: RO indicates the message has been read.

Perhaps you could find some script (perl, bash, php, etc) that is already written for parsing mail files. Then alter it to parse out the messages already marked as read.

Assume this script was called filter-mail, run it something like this:

filter-mail < current-mail-file > new-mail-file


Where the script reads in the mail, and only writes out unread messages.

With some searching you may even be able to find an existing script that already has that feature built-in.

Edit: An example of a mail parsing script can be found at the link below - I have no personal knowledge as to whether it is adequate for the job or not.

http://www.onlamp.com/onlamp/2004/04/08/ex...s/parse_mbox.pl