How to delete all or some emails from a mailbox without logging in to the mailbox?

As a workaround, one of the following methods can be applied:

1. Delete the mailbox from the server and create it again – all emails will be removed;
2. Directly manipulate with Dovecot administrative utilities on a server:

   Note: SSH access to the server is required.
   Mailbox should be enabled: The “Mailbox” option is checked in Domains > example.com > Email Addresses > joedoe@example.com

   • Get the information about existing mailboxes:

• doveadm mailbox list -u user@example.com

  INBOX
  INBOX.Spam
  INBOX.Drafts
  INBOX.Trash
  INBOX.Sent

• Remove all messages older than a week from the 'Inbox' folder for the particular mailbox user@example.com:

• doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox ‘*’ before 1w

• Remove all messages older than a week from all folders except 'Inbox' folder for the particular mailbox user@example.com:

• doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox INBOX.’*’ before 1w

• Remove all messages from 'Drafts' folder on all example.com domain mailboxes:

• for i in $(plesk bin mail -l | tr ‘\t’ ‘ ‘ | cut -d’ ‘ -f 3- | grep example.com); do doveadm expunge -u “$i” mailbox INBOX.Drafts all; done

• Delete all messages from the particular mailbox user@example.com:

• doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox ‘INBOX’ all
  # doveadm expunge -u user@example.com mailbox ‘INBOX.*’ all

• Remove all messages from 'Spam' and 'Trash' folders from all mailboxes on all domains:

• for i in $(plesk bin mail -l | tr ‘\t’ ‘ ‘ | cut -d’ ‘ -f 3-); do doveadm expunge -u “$i” mailbox INBOX.Spam all; done
  # for i in $(plesk bin mail -l | tr ‘\t’ ‘ ‘ | cut -d’ ‘ -f 3-); do doveadm expunge -u “$i” mailbox INBOX.Trash all; done

  Note: courier-imap does not support these commands

• Also the procedure can be optimized by deleting all emails for all mailboxes specified in a file:
  • Download the following script and grant permissions:

• wget https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/article_attachments/360009079459/script.sh
  # chmod +x ./script.sh

• Edit/Create file mbox.txt and specify all mailboxes for you wish to remove emails from:

  johndoe@example.com
  …
  jjohndoe2@example.org

• Execute the script:

2. • • ./script.sh