Automatically deletes messages to trash or junk mail folder with a certain age

Dovecot is able to automatic delete emails, that are in the Trash and Junk/Spam folder, by the way, you can delete emails in other folders in the same way.

cd /root
git clone https://github.com/filipnet/dovecot-autoclean.git

It is a good practice to first test which messages would be deleted before actually deleting them with "expunge".

doveadm search -u max.mustermann mailbox Trash savedbefore 5w

doveadm expunge -u max.mustermann mailbox Trash savedbefore 5w

Create a bash script to perform the deletion automatically on a regular basis vim /root/dovecot-autoclean/dovecot_expunge.sh

#!/bin/bash
# which doveadm
DOVEADM="/usr/bin/doveadm";
$DOVEADM expunge -A mailbox Trash savedbefore 30d
$DOVEADM expunge -A mailbox Junk  savedbefore 90d

The script must be made executable with chmod +x /root/dovecot-autoclean/dovecot_expunge.sh Add the line below to /etc/crontab:

# This task always executes the script on the first day of the month
10 0 * * 1 root /root/dovecot-autoclean/dovecot_expunge.sh >/dev/null 2>&1