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I am not trying to remove all the mails.

I googled for mark all mail as read, actually got posts saying how to delete them instead.

I found out using echo p | mail will output first of unread then mark it read, but if I do this, I have to loop through them.

I figured for all read mails, they will be appended to a file named mbox

What I am trying to do is...I want to create a bash file which is then used for crontab that let's say, at the end of each month, change the name of mbox into month-year in this way I can keep track and organize the mails BUT in order to have the mails appended into mbox is reading the mails one by one first.

Am I thinking this in a wrong direction? Or can someone give me some advices?

Thanks in advance for any help

EDIT: I am just using sudo apt install mailutils for my ubuntu server

Dora
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  • @dessert edited, that's the only thing I installed – Dora Jan 10 '18 at 22:18
  • You have to find or modify a script , example - http://www.aoakley.com/articles/2009-01-11-markallread.php . Please read the comments in the script and adjust accordingly. – Panther Jan 11 '18 at 01:27

3 Answers3

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I was able to do it as follows:

  1. Type mail, it tell me how many unread messages I have. Let's say, 31.
  2. Type t 1-31, it displays all messages from 1 to 31 in a big concatenated sheet (turned out that t * achieves the same result, thanks to Jaime Hablutzel)
  3. Type q to quit view mode, type q again to quit mail

That's it! mail says all 31 messages saved in your mbox file, and next time you enter it, it will say "no mail for you".

Vlad Nikiforov
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    This works perfectly on the macOS mail utility as well – Jay Dorsey Oct 08 '20 at 17:47
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    Isn't t * more straightforward?. – Jaime Hablutzel Mar 24 '21 at 18:16
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    In my case I wanted to delete all the mail messages. For this, all you need to do is: 1) type mail; 2) d *; 3) q – juanmirocks Sep 28 '21 at 12:14
  • I use Ubuntu 20.04. When I press q, it shows the next message. When I press Ctrl+C and then q, it marks as read only few messages. What am I doing wrong? – Finesse Jul 03 '22 at 02:43
  • I've solved it by making a text consisting only of many q letters and pasting it into the message display of mail – Finesse Jul 03 '22 at 03:22
  • if you still want to see your mail ever again, then you should follow that up with hold * and then q if you want to exit without shoving the mail off into the (home folder) void, then x and it will not persist any changes like which emails you've viewed – Dave Ankin Oct 16 '22 at 02:44
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A minor improvement on Vlad's answer. If you are not interested in the content and just want to mark the mails read, the follow command is more efficient: top :u. The command "top" shows only the first few lines of the message and :u gives just unread messages.

Zanna
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Sam Wong
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0

From the man page for mail:

seen

Takes a message list and marks all messages as having been read.

Therefore in mail;

? seen *

will mark all messages read without removing them.

Although it appears ubuntu mail doesn't have this command.

user2431714
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