Too many messages in mutt

I have learned something useful for anyone that uses mutt to mail from the terminal. I can be used to get messages from cron that runs periodically. Cron can run as much as once a minute. My cron has been sending me the message "don't update" for 6 months. It has caused about 40MB or 29000 messages to pile up in mutt. Now I have fixed the problem so it won't echo out for success. It should only tell me about failures not successes since they don't happen very often.

Usually you can delete hundreds of messages by holding down the delete button but since I had so many messages I had to learn how to delete bult amounts of mutt mail all at once. Here is how to do it:

type D

This will tell mutt to delete using a certain pattern. I tried using "update" but it didn't work so I figured out what will tag all of the messages at once.

type .

Thats right, a period.

Then type $ to have mutt ask if you want to purge 29000 messages. It takes a second and its done.