7.5  Automated items clean-out

Kerio MailServer includes an option of setting a special rule for automatic deletion of all items older than a defined number of days.

This rule is useful especially if users are not disciplined enough to delete their messages on their own from time to time and thus free disk space for other purposes or newer email.

TIP

To optimize results, it is recommended to combine this rule with quotas for mailbox size and with deleted items recovery (see section 7.4  Restoring deleted items). Users can then view in Kerio WebMail or in MS Outlook how much space is still available for their email.

If anyone loses an important message which is accidentally moved to a folder which is cleaned up automatically, deleted messages can be simply recovered before the store with deleted items is completely cleared out (with the deleted items recovery option).

Automatic clean-out can be applied to the following folders:

Note: If there are subfolders in Junk E-Mail and/or Deleted Items, the items inside them will be deleted in dependence on the set time limit. If a subfolder is empty, it is deleted automatically (the time limit does not apply here).

In both folders, such items will be deleted where date of creation would not have been modified for the previous X days (defined in settings). Date of creation is changed in the following cases:

The check for items ready for clean-out is run approximately every 6 hours (depending on the store directory size). To avoid the server's overload, up to 1000 items is deleted from each folder within one clean-out.

Items clean-out can be applied either in a batch on all users of the particular domain or on selected users:

Setting automatic items clean-out for a domain

Automatic clear-out of items accounts of all users of a particular domain (in a batch) can be set under Configuration → Domains:

Domain Settings — Messages

Figure 7.5. Domain Settings — Messages


  1. Open the domain settings dialog where automatic clear-out will be set.

  2. Switch to the Email tab.

  3. In the  Items clean-out section, select folders for automatic clean-out and set their clean-out timeout.

Setting of automatic clear-out for particular users

Automatic email clear-out for particular users can be set under Domain Settings → Users:

Setting of automatic clear-out for particular users

Figure 7.6. Setting of automatic clear-out for particular users


  1. Open the dialog with settings for the particular user to set automatic clean-out.

  2. Go to the Messages tab (see figure 7.6  Setting of automatic clear-out for particular users).

  3. In the Items clean-out section, select which folders you want to clean out automatically and set timeout for the clean-out