Delete mails with attachments

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)

color index green black "~X 1-"

That is match message with 1 or more attachments.

works with my version of mutt (mutt-patched 1.5.21-5nntp1) though it looks like it's available in the vanilla version from mutt.org as well and has first been introduced in 1.5.12 released in September 2005.

It's going to be slow in any case, because to find out about attachments, you have to read the body (so that means the emails will have to be downloaded). Or you can use Dennis solution that gives a good approximation in most cases.