Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.3 Administration Guide

20.9.1 imexpire Theory of Operation

imexpire can be invoked from the command line or scheduled to run automatically by the imsched daemon. The administrator specifies a set of expiration rules in a file called store.expirerule. This file specifies the criteria by which messages are removed. There can be multiple files with each put in the directory that pertains to the scope of the rules. That is, rules that apply globally to the entire message store are put in one directory, rules that apply to a partition in another, rules that apply to users in yet another, and so on.


Note –

Although global expiration rules can be specified with the configutil command and store.expire.attribute parameters, it is better to use store.expirerule to specify these rules. If too many rules are created using configutil, performance problems can result.


imexpire loads all of the expire rules at start up. By default, imexpire creates one thread per partition. Each thread goes through the list of user folders under its assigned partition and loads the local expire rule files as it goes. The expire function checks each folder against the expire rules applicable to this folder and expunges messages as needed. If there is a store.exp file that exists under the mailbox directory, and there are messages that have been expunged/expired for longer than the time specified by the store.cleanupage configuration parameter, the purge function will permanently remove the message files under the message hash directories and remove the UID records from the store.exp files.

It is also possible to exclude specified users from the expire rules by adding their user ID, one per line, in a file called expire_exclude_list in msg-svr-base/config/.