Overview
Administrators can configure the Items Clean-Out feature which performs automatic user mailbox cleanup older than a specified time period, i.e. 30 days, to save space on the datastore disk.
Kerio Connect mailserver process runs the email account cleanup periodically based on message store size. Autodelete Clean-Out mails can be applied to Trash, Spam, Sent, and All folders (except Contacts and Notes).
The Item Clean-Out is looking at the date of the mails modification/manipulation, i.e. the timestamp when the email was moved to the folder, not the Creation date.
Solution
If you do not want to lose any messages with this clean-out, then archive or backup the datastore first and only then proceed further.
Access to Kerio Connect Administration is required to make any changes
To configure the clean-out feature, multiple settings can be modified as per your requirement:
Per-Domain Settings
- In the administration interface, navigate to the Configuration > Domains section.
- Double-click on a domain.
- On the Messages tab, choose the folders for automatic clean-out and set the number of days.
- Click OK.
Per-User Settings
By default, new users inherit settings from their domain. To change the settings for individual users, follow the steps mentioned below:
- In the administration interface, navigate to the Accounts > Users section.
- Double-click on a user.
- Navigate to the Messages tab.
- In the Items Clean-Out section, select the Use custom settings for this user option.
- Select the folders for automatic clean-out and set the number of days.
- Click OK.
Folder Limit Settings
This works like a scheduled task and does not clean all relevant items at once. By default, it is set up to clean-out only 1000 items per folder at once, so that server performance is not affected. Therefore, the actual clean-out can take a while for large email folders. The steps to change this limit are outlined below:
- Stop the Kerio Connect server (Windows / macOS/Linux)
-
Navigate to the Kerio Connect installation folder. The defaults are:
- Windows:
C:\Program Files\Kerio\MailServer
-
macOS:
/usr/local/kerio/mailserver
-
Linux:
/opt/kerio/mailserver
- Windows:
- Open the
mailserver.cfg
file. -
Navigate to the
<table name="MessageStore">
section. -
Change the value (1000 in the example below) of the variable
AutoDeleteFolderLimit
, as shown in this example: - Start the Kerio Connect server (Windows / macOS/Linux)
Note: If the increase in limit leads to server performance issues, you must revert it to the default state.
If after some time/days, you are observing that emails are still not being deleted as per the updated settings, then the next option is to restart the server, which runs the clean-out script when it starts up. When this action happens, the Operations logs would contain entries with the label:
{DELETE} Protocol: SYSTEM, User: $cleanout_agent
Testing
Emails are being autodeleted based on the specified/updated time period.