Re: [MacPerl] Line at a time mail client

[David Steffen <steffen@biomedcomp.com>]

Arved,

In reply to:

>why not write a little Net::POP3 filter all
>of 10 or 15 lines long that looks at the size of each message on the
>mailserver, only downloads the ones below a certain size, and sends a
>nastygram to the authors of the others? :-)

(and/or as Chris Nandor suggested, deleting them thus freeing up space on
the server and preventing death by sysadmin strangulation)

Great idea; if I proceed I certainly will try this.

This won't work if popd chokes on the huge messages, but the only way to
find out is try.

The sort of solution I was thinking of goes as follows:

1) FTP your mail spool file if you are on a remote system; copy or read it
in place if you can log onto the mail server.

2) Copy the mail file, skipping the big messages.

3) Delete the old mail spool file and replace it with your slimmed down copy.

Obviously, this is crude and clumsy, but what most sysadmins do now is just
delete your entire spool file, even cruder and clumsier :-)

Some refinement of the above could be used to avoid loosing any email that
arrived during the processing.

An improved version could in addition to the above, extract the huge
attachments  and decode them (assuming you have the disk space for them :-)

My main concern is still if this is of some value.  I note that Eudora can
be instructed to ignore long messages (which would have temporarily solved
my wife's problem) but doesn't AFAIK provide a mechanism for deleting them.
I'm wondering if common mail programs have an adequate solution for this
problem if only I knew it.

-David-

David Steffen, Ph.D.
President, Biomedical Computing, Inc. <http://www.biomedcomp.com/>
Phone: (713) 610-9770 FAX: (713) 610-9769 E-mail: steffen@biomedcomp.com



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