Self-clearing mailbox?

MattShepherd

I'd like to set up an email for a lot of garbage one-off things -- sign up for ____, and you have to confirm a link sent to an email but you never need to hear from these people again. My ideal setup would be a mailbox I can log into when I need to respond to these emails, but that clears itself every night at midnight (or something). Is this doable?

houdinihound

As far as I know there isn't a simple switch that would accomplish this. But you can certainly write a script that you set up as a cron task that connects to your mailbox and deletes all email.

Relevant clipped bits from a python script I use to access an IMAP mailbox dedicated to receiving bounced messages:

import imaplib
import ssl

# connect to mailbox.
ctx = ssl.create_default_context()
server = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(host=imaphost, ssl_context=ctx)
server.login(mailbox,passwd)

# choose which messages you want.
server.select()
resp, items = server.search(None, "ALL")

# get all the message ids.
items = items[0].split()

for i in items:
    # Mark for deletion (sets the IMAP delete flag on the message).
    server.store(i, '+FLAGS', '\\Deleted')

# Physically remove the messages.
server.expunge()
server.logout()

Hope that helps get you started,

sean

Here's a slightly different version of @houdinihound's script. This one has a bit of a safety net in that it deletes only those messages that were received prior to the current day:

#!/bin/env python3

import imaplib
import ssl
from datetime import datetime

# your IMAP server credentials
IMAP_HOST = 'mail.us.opalstack.com'
IMAP_USER = 'mail_username'
IMAP_PASS = 'mail_password'

def clear_old_messages():

    today = datetime.today().strftime('%d-%b-%Y')

    ctx = ssl.create_default_context()
    server = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(host=IMAP_HOST, ssl_context=ctx)
    server.login(IMAP_USER, IMAP_PASS)
    server.select()

    resp, items = server.search(None, f"SENTBEFORE {today}")
    items = items[0].split()
    for i in items:
        server.store(i, '+FLAGS', '\\Deleted')

    server.expunge()
    server.logout()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    clear_old_messages()

MattShepherd

I'm new to cron tasks -- would I install this on a local machine to run from here? I have a household media server running Ubuntu that could do it.

sean

MattShepherd You can run my example anywhere that has Python 3.