pop mail cleaner

Wed Jan 28 15:31:36 PST 2004

Jim,

Thanks for the offer.  My provider charges me < $100/year for 500M storage,
unlimited email, and unlimited bandwidth.  Their NOC is staffed 24x7 and this
is the first outage they've had while I've been a customer (not quite a year
yet).  When I called to find out what was going on, the person I spoke with
(within 5 minutes) knew what was going on, who was working the problem, and the
ETA for a resolution.  While I'm not happy with the outage, I am happy with
their support in this bad situation -- to be able to field calls from all their
customers that quickly, _and_ have a clue when they do so, was nice.  When I
called my previous provider up to get an ETA on their (frequent) outages, I'd
usually get a response of "Oh?  It's down?  Let me look... yeah, you're right.
We'll get on that right away..." and usually 2-3 days later things would start
flowing again.  That provider was "free" so I guess you get what you pay for.
:-)

Anyway since I use this mostly for mail and a bit of web stuff, the delay isn't
mission critical, as long as things queue.  It was just an annoyance...

I whipped up the pop frontend because I was tired of telnet'ing to port 110 and
doing 'top 1 10' to see the messages, then 'dele 1' to delete 'em, one at a
time....and having the connection die after doing that a dozen or so times (and
my commands had scrolled off the screen, so I was keeping a piece of paper with
the messages I wanted to kill on it.... heh)

This little bugger lets me say:
	> bs 20			# batch size = 20 messages / fetch
	> g				# get next block of <bs> messages
	> l				# display all the headers I've
downloaded
	> d 1 2 10-15 17-90	# delete the specified msgs
	> c				# commit the deletion
	> g				# get the next batch of 20
	[...]				# you get the idea

Much easier than keying in those long pop commands repeatedly, only to have the
connection die after manually deleting a dozen messages.  :-)

Rich
--
Rich Holland        (913) 645-1950        SAP Technical Consultant
print unpack("u","92G5S\=\"!A;F]T:&5R(\'!E<FP\@:&%C:V5R\"\@\`\`");

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Hickstein [mailto:jxh at jxh.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2004 6:21 PM
> To: holland at guidancetech.com
> Cc: baylisa at baylisa.org
> Subject: Re: pop mail cleaner
> 
> > The code is < 200 lines and basically wraps the Mail::POP3Client module
> > from CPAN.
> 
> Oh!  Interesting.  I always just TELNET to port 110, but I do it enough
> (barely) to remember how.
> 
> Apropos your mail provider's reliability, please excuse this plug for my
> own business: http://www.imap-partners.net/ .  IMAP isn't so easily fooled
> as POP by "new" messages, and you can blow away your clients and try new
> ones at will.  (And you can TELNET to port 143 -- whee!!! -- but this takes
> more practice.)
> 
> And if we had an outage that long, we would probably fall on our swords,
> after refunding most of your money.