Deleting unused or dormant mail accounts.

Joseph Brennan brennan at columbia.edu
Mon Sep 12 09:21:18 EDT 2011


Andres Tarallo <atarallo at acm.org> wrote:

> In order to get a list of mailboxes to be removed we're looking the
> date the file username.seen was last modified. Do we have a better
> strategy?


Judging by the last delivery date is compromised by spam. Getting
mail unfortunately does not mean the account is being used.

Judging by seen state is much better provided you can assume IMAP.
I don't think POP updates seen. But POP devices tend to check in
regularly, so you could cover obvious cases by checking the last
couple of weeks of system log. It won't be perfect.


Joseph Brennan
Columbia University Information Technology



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