CleanupMyMailbox is a command-line utility that deletes emails of a certain age from a specific mailbox within Microsoft Exchange Server.
I work within a corporate environment that manages its own Microsoft Exchange Server. I am also on a development team and receive thousands of automated email messages per day from various services that run across multiple servers. I started out creating rules for these emails in MS Outlook that sorted them into folders based on the service that generated them. I would then go in once a day and clean out the folders. This is a bit tedious. Additionally, I want to keep emails that are within the last day in case something goes wrong with that service and I need to reference an email that was generated. Even more tedious.
Next I thought to myself, "Why don't I use the built-in Outlook Archive method?" That would be a great option, but my company manages our archive policies. That means I cannot modify them.
Finally, having all other avenues closed to me, I decided to write my own utility to perform this task. I am, after all, a Software Engineer.
You can click on the Release tab above or navigate to https://github.com/franzone/CleanupMyMailbox/releases.
.\CleanupMyMailbox.exe --help
This will print the following:
********************************************************************************
Cleanup My Mailbox 1.0.0
Copyright (c) 2020 Jonathan Franzone
********************************************************************************
-v, --verbose Set output to verbose messages.
-e, --email Required. Email address
-m, --mailbox Path to the mailbox that needs to be cleaned. Use
a forward slash path separator. For example:
INBOX/Automated/Services
-d, --defaultcredentials Use default credentials. Use this option for
hosted Exchange instances where the user is logged
into the same domain.
-u, --username Username for authenticating to the Exchange
server. Leave blank if the same as your email
address.
-s, --password Password for authenticating to the Exchange
server. If required and left blank the program
will prompt for a password.
-a, --age Required. The age of emails after which they
should be deleted. This should be a string that
the .NET TimeSpan.Parse() method will recognize.
For example: 1 = 1 day, 6:30 = 6 hours and 30
minutes
-n, --noprompt Do not prompt before deleting emails
--help Display this help screen.
--version Display version information.
If you are targeting an on-premises Exchange server and your client/workstation is domain joined, then you don't need to enter credentials.
.\CleanupMyMailbox.exe --email [email protected] --mailbox "Sorted/Service Emails" --age 1 --defaultcredentials
This will delete emails in the folder INBOX\Sorted\Service Emails that are at least 1 day old for the email [email protected].
If you are connecting to a remote instance of Exchange (i.e. Office365), then you'll need to enter credentials.
.\CleanupMyMailbox.exe --email [email protected] --mailbox "Sorted/Service Emails" --age 1 --password MyS3cret
You may use the --username parameter to specify your login username. If this is not provided then the utility will use your email address
(as provided by --email). You may use the --password parameter to provide your email password on the command line. If you do not provide
the --password then the utility will prompt (if it is required).
- Currently limited to processing 1000 emails at a time. This is because of a paging feature in EWS. I haven't bothered to implement any type of paging.
- It is possible that the list of emails found in the search could change while processing. This program makes no attempt to detect that condition or to correctly handle it.
By using this software you assume all responsibility for anything and everything that could ever go wrong... ever. So don't sue me if you break something.
- How to Delete Old Emails in MS Exchange Using EWS
- Get started with EWS Managed API client applications
- TimeSpan.Parse Method - See his page for the string format for various timespans.