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How to empty Email of an User in redhat

Need to empty the email box of a user on a Red Hat 8 Server.

Servers using Sendmail.

Access: SSH

Dont know what commands to execute and know how much email does that account has.

F. Dominicus

The incoming mail is usually saved in /var/mail or /var/spool for /var/spool/mail in file names after the login.

So you can run a
ssh your_remote_login@remote_location "sh -c > /var/mail/login_name"
or
ssh your_remote_login@remote_location rm -f /var/mail/login_name

Of course you need an account which is allowed to write that, it's IMHO not a good idea to allow root login (even with ssh) so you could setup sudo on the remote machine to do the actual delting.

Friedrich

ppfoong

By default, the email files are in /var/spool/mail directory, one file per user, filename follows the username.

You can remove the mails by either of the below:

cp /dev/null /var/spool/mail/username
cat /dev/null /var/spool/mail/username
rm -f /var/spool/mail/username

ppfoong

Sorry, the cat command should be:

cat /dev/null > /var/spool/mail/username

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fpintos

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F. Dominicus

fpintos
what do you think my use of ssh does?

Friedrich

prashsax

Just one thing to remember, don't just delete all the mails, if possible move them and store it somewhere else for few days. You never know, when the user or someone else will ask for those mails.

fpintos

Friedrich,

ssh your_remote_login@remote_location "sh -c > /var/mail/login_name"

will give sh: -c: option requires an argument........

fpintos

Friedrich,

FYI, you don't need to fork another shell "sh -c" in your remote ssh to empty a file, using the immediate shell (spawn by sshd) and ":" syntax is faster and more efficient.