As I am about to drop a server, I thought, I should clean up my Maildir
directory, just in case. It may contain some emails with password and such so I do not want those to be readable by others. I used the following command line:
find Maildir/ -type f -exec shred -u {} \;
To my surprise, that command line did not return even after a few minutes. So I ran another command to see how many files I had under Maildir
:
find Maildir/ -type f | wc
14736 17737 1394113
And yes. That's 14,736 files.
What is going on with postfix?
I'm using thunderbird as a client, but that should not affect how the server works. So why would all those files be created and kept there?
As an example, I have a Folder named "Blogs" with a sub-folder named "Warriors" in Thunderbird. When I look at Thunderbird, that folder is definitely empty. When looking at my Maildir
folder, I see two files. I have the real impression that postfix does not delete emails that I delete in Thunderbird. Could that be it? The two files below were deleted a while back and yet they are still there on my mail server nearly 3 months later...
Maildir/.Blogs.Warriors/cur:
total 16
drwx------ 2 alexis alexis 4096 Feb 8 00:10 .
drwx------ 6 alexis alexis 4096 Feb 8 00:03 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 alexis alexis 2727 Feb 5 00:02 1486252970.M453258P14727V0000000000000800I00000000001E4FDE_9.m2osw.com,S=2727:2,ST
-rw-r--r-- 1 alexis alexis 2646 Feb 8 00:02 1486512185.M350097P2621V0000000000000800I00000000001E4F7B_84.m2osw.com,S=2646:2,ST