Best way to handle lots of mail on server

emailterminal

Due to some bad cron jobs I now have ~1600 mail messages, most of them containing the same error log. I would like to quickly group them by subject and delete them, while limiting the chances of missing some important message.

I couldn't figure out a way to do anything using the mail command other than deleting each message individually. I tried installing pine, but it seems that even there I have to go over each message individually and hit the D key.

Surely there's a way to script this. Right?

I'm using ubuntu server 10.04.

Best Answer

Mutt is really good at this. You could tag-pattern (shift-T) on the common subject string, then tag-prefix (;) delete (d) the matching messages.

"Mutt Manual, Using Tags"

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OK, I poked aorund, and when Alpine "deletes" an attachment, it actually replaces it with something like:

Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=US-ASCII
X-Content-Type: image/jpeg
X-Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-ID: <part1.07020604.05000506@flamescape.com>

  [ The following attachment was DELETED when this message was saved:    ]
  [ A Image/JPEG segment of about 93,336 bytes.                          ]

I can then use emacs to edit this message (and it doesn't mess up any Content-Length headers or anything)

Mutt: mark as read and delete

To simultaneously mark a message as read and delete it you can use the set resolve=no before the command to avoid jumping to the next message. This avoid having to check condition and such. Your cursor will stay in place after the ation is done.

For example, I uses the following to mark as read before moving a message to an archive maildir:

macro index,pager a ":set confirmappend=no delete=yes resolve=no\n<clear-flag>N<tag-prefix><save-message>=archive\n:set confirmappend=yes delete=ask-yes resolve=yes\n<next-undeleted>"

This will:

Set some value before the action, including resolve=no to avoid jumping to the next message
Clear the unread flag: <clear-flag>N
Save the message into my archive: <tag-prefix><save-message>=archive
Set value back to what they should be, including resolve
Jump to the next undeleted message: <next-undeleted>

So to mark as read and delete, something like this should work:

macro index,pager d ":set confirmappend=no delete=yes resolve=no\n<clear-flag>N<tag-prefix><delete-message>:set confirmappend=yes delete=ask-yes resolve=yes\n<next-undeleted>"

Best Answer

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Mutt: mark as read and delete

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