Re: [MacPerl] Line at a time mail client

[John W Baxter <jwblist@olympus.net>]

At 12:35 -0500 4/13/99, David Steffen wrote:
>Obviously, this is crude and clumsy, but what most sysadmins do now is just
>delete your entire spool file, even cruder and clumsier :-)

What this sysadmin does, for a clog in the mail account clog, is

cd /var/mail
cp -p clog clog.work
ls -l         #just to verify that all is well
cat > clog
^D
#the above makes the old mail file empty without upsetting ownership
emacs clog.work
#fix the problem...different if Navigator 3 messed up than if Outlook
Express (windows) messed up [Mac Outlook Express hasn't caused a clog here
yet]
cat clog.work >> clog    #puts the mail back, preserving anything which has
                     arrived in the meantime
!ls     #make sure things look right
rm clog.work clog.work~   #clean up the mess

   ------
We've set up a simple-minded Web access for our mail server...it is clever
enough that it can delete messages, after showing the first few lines of
large ones (or all of small ones) to the user.  That has reduced my
clog-removal chores considerably...the gradual and most welcome demise of
Navigator 3.x (Mac and Win) has also helped.

[What didn't help was a period last fall when a Microsoft marketing list
was sending out messages which old versions of MS Outlook on Win95 couldn't
handle...the messages crashed Outlook.]

And, of course, Eudora and now Mailsmith allow one to delete messages
selectively.

   --John

--
John Baxter   jwblist@olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach him to fish,
and you get rid of him for the weekend.

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