One of the problems we appear to run into when running a vBulletin forum or any of that type of busy online community is that you increase the issue of getting flooding with mail messages for actions and / or errors.

For example, if you have 500 users online and your mysql database goes down you get 500 users generating error msgs. If this lasts a day your mailbox could easily be flooded with over many thousands of messages saying that vbulletin couldn't connect to the database.

Now what? Your mail client might not even be able to handle it.

Well, first thing, go into the admin control panel > vbulletin options and find the error handling section. There you can set paths to a private dir to store .log files, up to x mb each. And at the bottom of that section there's an option to turn off sending those mails, so it will store them to the .log files. Now if your site goes down and you need to find out why you can ftp in and get the .log files.

You can use a mail filter to strip down at once while downloading the mail from the server, the mails with the similar subject "vBulletin database error!"

Set your mail client to immediately delete the mail from the server when it runs into it, skipping its download. It might take a while, but it will get there.

I wish I knew a command though to simply flush certain msgs on the server.