Clearing a stuck POP mailbox with Ruby Net::Telnet
Posted by Wes in 
A client’s mailbox was full. Outlook tried to download all messages before deleting them, and I don’t know a setting to make it retrieve/delete a set number.
So, knowing that you can telnet to a POP server, I wrote up a little ruby script to delete the first 1000 messages without bothering to retrieve them.
require 'net/telnet'
pop = Net::Telnet::new("Host" => "pop.server.com",
"Port" => 110,
"Telnetmode" => false,
"Timeout" => false,
"Prompt" => /^\+OK/n)
pop.cmd("user " + "name@domain.com") { |c| print c }
pop.cmd("pass " + "P@ssword") { |c| print c }
pop.cmd("stat") { |c| print c }
1.upto(1000) do |i|
pop.cmd("dele #{i}")
puts i if 0 == i % 100
end
pop.cmd("stat") { |c| print c }
pop.cmd("quit") { |c| print c }
Here’s the output:
+OK hello from popgate 2.43 on pop.server.com +OK password required. +OK maildrop ready, 50139 messages (1474122084 octets) (1477758478) 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 +OK message 1000 marked deleted +OK 49139 1462508238
I put the STAT lines in there so I could see how many messages were there at the start and finish of the script running.
The Ruby POP3 library has a delete_all(), but the last day or so of mail hadn’t been retrieved at all, so I couldn’t just nuke the mailbox and start over. I only needed to clear some space so that I could connect normally (and set the client to delete-on-retrieve). You could mimic that by parsing the STAT response for the number of messages. I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
I made some more tweaks after writing this post and added support for growl:
system "growlnotify -m '#{i} of 1000 deleted'
-d popdelete" if 0 == i % 25
That way I could just watch the growl window in the corner to see how it was doing. The -d flag groups the notifications so that I didn’t get a separate notification window for each message; the new message updates the previous notification window.
When I was searching for a solution before writing my own, I looked for “pop delete all” and “pop clear” and “pop commands” and “pop command delete all”. Hope that helps someone else find this article.
