How to Delete mailman archives on cPanel using the Linux terminal

Mailman archiving can be turned off from your mailing list administration area, at option Archive. However… let’s suppose you have a mailman mailing list called [email protected] and you need to clean that list from the command line. The question is: how can I delete mailman archives from the terminal on cPanel?

Step by step delete mailman archives on cPanel from command line

cd /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/archives/private

You will see lot of directories inside that location.

Each directory is usually associated with a mailman email list, for example:

[email protected] will have this directory assigned: list_yoursite.com

Active lists in a single cpanel server:

drwxr-x---  2 mailman nobody  4.0K Feb 10  2014 mailman/
drwxrwx---  2 mailman mailman 4.0K Feb 10  2014 mailman.mbox/
drwxr-x---  2 mailman nobody  4.0K Nov 18 23:47 mail_mailing.com/
drwxrwx---  2 mailman mailman 4.0K Nov 18 23:47 mail_mailing.com.mbox/
drwxr-x---  2 mailman nobody  4.0K Nov 18 23:47 list_yoursite.com/
drwxrwx---  2 mailman mailman 4.0K Nov 18 23:47 list_yoursite.mbox/

Now that you located your directory list, move inside that location.

cd list_yoursite.com

List the content with ls command

ls -alh

This is the output on one of my servers:

drwxr-xr-x  2 mailman mailman 4.0K Sep 13  2016 2016-September/
-rw-r--r--  1 mailman mailman 1.4K Sep 13  2016 2016-September.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 mailman mailman  680 Sep 14  2016 2016-September.txt.gz
drwxr-xr-x  3 mailman mailman 4.0K Sep 13  2016 attachments/
drwxr-x---  2 mailman mailman 4.0K Sep 13  2016 database/
-rw-r--r--  1 mailman mailman 1.2K Sep 13  2016 index.html
-rw-r--r--  1 mailman mailman  925 Sep 13  2016 pipermail.pck

Now remove all the 2016-September.* in this case:

rm 2016* -rf

You can also remove the database and attachments if you want, as they also store old data from your mailman lists:

[[email protected]:~]ls -alh database/
total 28K
drwxr-x--- 2 mailman mailman 4.0K Sep 13 2016 ./
drwxr-x--- 5 mailman nobody 4.0K Sep 14 2016 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 mailman mailman 2.1K Sep 13 2016 2016-September-article
-rw-r--r-- 1 mailman mailman 344 Sep 13 2016 2016-September-author
-rw-r--r-- 1 mailman mailman 285 Sep 13 2016 2016-September-date
-rw-r--r-- 1 mailman mailman 311 Sep 13 2016 2016-September-subject
-rw-r--r-- 1 mailman mailman 288 Sep 13 2016 2016-September-thread
[[email protected]:~]ls -alh attachments/
total 12K
drwxr-xr-x 3 mailman mailman 4.0K Sep 13 2016 ./
drwxr-x--- 5 mailman nobody 4.0K Sep 14 2016 ../
drwxr-xr-x 3 mailman mailman 4.0K Sep 13 2016 20160913/
[[email protected]:~]

That’s all, now you know how to delete mailman archives on cpanel / whm servers.

To reflect the disk space usage in cPanel and to clean the cache for mailman run below command:

/scripts/update_mailman_cache

Further reading:

• Mailman
• cPanel Maiman FAQ