Email Problem On My Web Server, Part 1

Last night I was working on updating a web site that I’ve neglected for quite some time. While working on it, I noticed that the links on that site’s blog were redirecting to a domain that had hosted my redirects at one point, but I later decided to use it for something else and deleted the redirects (not a good idea, by the way!). That “something else” got started several months ago and fell off the proverbial plate.

In other words, I had *two* neglected sites!

Since the redirects on that blog no longer worked (and might have been costing me lost commissions) I decided to go for the easy fix: simply upload a PHP-based redirect to the “project” domain. I fired up my FTP client and went to upload the redirect.

I couldn’t create a directory, nor could I upload the file.

To make a long story short, I had forgotten to set up the email on that domain so that anything not addressed to a specific account got bounced back to the sender. And there were over 16,000 spam messages in the catch-all Inbox — messages which I had to delete — and which had taken the disk utilization to 100%.

I couldn’t add a single thing to the web site.

I’ll get into the “how to prevent this” in a future post, but first I want to tell you how I fixed the problem.

I first started to simply delete the messages in the web-based email client provided by my web hosting company. But at 100 messages per screen, it would have taken over 160 screens worth of deleting… Plus I did not have a “Trash” folder to send the messages to (you have to create it yourself in this application), and with all available disk space used, I couldn’t create it!

In other words, that method didn’t work.

The next method was to go to my FTP client, go into the “mail/new” directory, and delete them manually. But my FTP client only retrieves 2,000 files in a directory listing at a time — and deletes them by issuing a “delete” command for each file. It would have taken forever!

The solution? I was able to use Putty, a secure shell client, to connect to my web server and do the actions from a command prompt. This requires a knowledge of Unix, of course, and probably isn’t a viable solution for most. I managed an entire network of Unix boxes at one point in the past, so this is not a problem for me.

I was able to go from 100 megabytes to about 3 megabytes of disk space used in about five minutes.

Coming soon: How the problem happened in the first place and how I fixed it.

Stay safe,
Tom