47 Managing Mailboxes

To Manage Mailboxes with mboxutil

Use the "mboxutil" command to perform typical maintenance tasks on mailboxes. mboxutil tasks include the following:

• List mailboxes

• List and remove orphaned and inactive mailboxes

• Create mailboxes

• Rename mailboxes

• Move mailboxes from one partition to another

• Expunge mailboxes

• Restore expunged messages that have not been purged

• List personal mailbox subscriptions and unsubscribed mailboxes that no longer exist

• You can also use the "mboxutil" command to view information about quotas. See "Managing Message Store Quotas" for more information.

When an end user deletes a mailbox, all messages are expunged and purged according to the value of store.cleanupage. However, expunged messages can be restored by using the mboxutil -R command, as long as you have enabled the store.mailboxpurgedelay option. Expunged messages are moved to the new location when a mailbox is renamed.

mboxutil -l

mboxutil -l -x

mboxutil -c user/daphne/INBOX

mboxutil -d user/delilah/projx

mboxutil -d user/druscilla/INBOX

mboxutil -r user/desdemona/memos user/desdemona/memos-april

mboxutil -r user/dimitria/INBOX user/dimitria/INBOX partition

mboxutil -r user/dimitria/personal user/dimitria/personal partition

To Move Mailboxes to a Different Disk Partition

By default, mailboxes are created in the primary partition. If the partition gets full, additional messages cannot be stored. There are several ways to address the problem:

• Reduce the size of user mailboxes

• If you are using volume management software, add additional disks

• Create additional partitions ("To Add a Message Store Partition") and move mailboxes to the new partitions

If possible, add additional disk space to a system using volume management software because this procedure is the most transparent for the user. However, you might also move mailboxes to a different partition.

To move mailboxes to a different partition using the mboxutil command:

1. Create an input file of the mailboxes to be moved.

   The input file must consist of pairs of duplicate lines, because the other use of mboxutil -r is to rename folders. Thus, the first line of each pair is the old folder name and the second line is the new folder name. In the case of moving a user from one partition to another, the folder names are the same. Here is an example input file, mvusers, for three users:

   user/z4user21@east.example.com/inbox
   user/z4user21@east.example.com/inbox
   user/z4user22@east.example.com/inbox
   user/z4user22@east.example.com/inbox
   user/z4user23@east.example.com/inbox
   user/z4user23@east.example.com/inbox
   

2. Move the users to a new partition called pool4:

   mboxutil -r -f /tmp/mvtest pool4
   rename user/z4user21@east.sun.com/inbox to user/z4user21@east.sun.com/inbox
   rename user/z4user22@east.sun.com/inbox to user/z4user22@east.sun.com/inbox
   rename user/z4user23@east.sun.com/inbox to user/z4user23@east.sun.com/inbox
   

   Note:

   If an error occurs with any individual mailbox move, the mboxutil command continues processing the rest of the input file. Thus, you must review the output (and possibly the default log file) to determine if any mailbox moves failed. Be sure to save that output.

To Remove Orphan Accounts

To search for orphaned accounts (orphaned accounts are mailboxes that do not have corresponding entries in LDAP) use the following "mboxutil" commands:

mboxutil -o

Command output follows:

mboxutil: Start checking for orphaned mailboxes
user/annie/INBOX
user/oliver/INBOX
mboxutil: Found 2 orphaned mailbox(es)
mboxutil: Done checking for orphaned mailboxes

Use the following command to create a file listing orphaned mailboxes that can be turned into a script file that deletes the orphaned mailboxes (example filename is orphans.cmd):

mboxutil -o -w orphans.cmd

The command output is as follows:

mboxutil: Start checking for orphaned mailboxes
mboxutil: Found 2 orphaned mailbox(es)
mboxutil: Done checking for orphaned mailboxes

Delete the orphan files with the following command:

mboxutil -d -f orphans.cmd

To Find a Mailbox's Directory Using hashdir

The mailboxes in the message store are stored in a hash structure for fast searching. Consequently, to find the directory that contains a particular user's mailbox, use the "hashdir" utility.

This utility identifies the directory that contains the message store for a particular account. This utility reports the relative path to the message store, such as d1/a7/. The path is relative to the directory level just before the one based on the user ID. The utility sends the path information to the standard output.

For example, to find the relative path to the mailbox for user crowe:

hashdir crowe

To Find Out How Many Users Have Read Messages in a Shared Folder

The "readership" utility reports on how many users other than the mailbox owner have read messages in a shared IMAP folder (see "Shared Folders Overview").

An owner of a IMAP folder may grant permission for others to read mail in the folder. A folder that others are allowed to access is called a shared folder. Administrators can use the readership utility to see how many users other than the owner are accessing a shared folder.

This utility scans all mailboxes and produces one line of output per shared folder, reporting the number of readers followed by a space and the name of the mailbox.

Each reader is a distinct authentication identity that has selected the shared folder within the past specified number of days. Users are not counted as reading their own personal mailboxes. Personal mailboxes are not reported unless there is at least one reader other than the folder's owner.

For example, the following command counts as a reader any identity that has selected the shared IMAP folder within the last 15 days:

readership -d 15