I'm trying to do a script which will automate these steps:

(1) Scan for each user mailbox
(2) Scan for each message in each user mailbox
(3) Remove messages which are older than somepredetermined date

My problem is in Step (2) where i have to scan for each message and check their size...

Using
> mail -f username

and then:

>size *

will print the size of each message.... But how can I do that from a script?? Also what does the size format mean in the form number1/number2. What is that "/" sign for?

Thanks.

Hi there , i assume you are going to develop a cgi or php program .. anyway im not an expert in this field what interested me was that in linux you have the mailbox located at /var/spool/mail under which there are individual files for individual users .. which actually store the users mail details , now this file collectively holds the mails , how can you get the size of old mails individually , yes of course you can sort out the dates by assigning a regular expression , but how will you get individual mail sizes , do let me know , all the best

Shaheen