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On Thursday, August 13 at 10:38 AM, quoth Paul Grinberg:
> So, let's say my fetchmail keeps all the mail on the mail server
> after mail download is complete.
Without being rude, let me stop you right there. Fetchmail with the
"leave it on the server" option is PROBABLY a bad setup for you. It
was originally intended for POP3 servers, as a workaround for the fact
that POP3 is phenomenally bad at handling multiple clients. It's a
hack, intended for specific and usually temporary situations (where a
certain amount of hackery is tolerable), not as a long-term solution.
If you have no choice but to use POP3, I highly recommend you use mutt
to access your POP3 server directly. With the message and header
caching, it can be just as fast as a fetchmail-based option, and it
handles things like deleted messages much better.
If you're using fetchmail and "leave it on the server" with IMAP...
you'd probably be better served by using the tool "offlineimap", which
handles this sort of thing extremely well.
> But sometimes you have spam, and other stuff that you usually delete
> (D). Emails stay on the mail server, and they hold space.
Indeed, as you instructed your software to do.
> How to properly delete mail if you know mail id???
Well, assuming you're using a fetchmail/POP3 setup, there's no real
solution that meets the "properly" category without either ditching
fetchmail or ditching the "leave it on the server" option.
But assuming you'll ignore my advice above, here's more hackery you
could do. First, you'd need a script that will identify messages on a
POP3 server based on a Message-ID or something similar. The problem,
of course, is that POP3 has no means of "searching" messages other
than by doing it the old fashioned way (download each one). Where IMAP
gives each message a unique, long-term UID number, POP3 does not (it
has UIDs, but they only last as long as the POP3 connection). So, you
would need to write a perl script (or use some other language) that,
given an input full-text message, would download every message on your
POP3 server until it found a message that matched the one you had. You
have to do a full-text matching (rather than just a header-based or
message-id-based matching) because POP3 has no concept of "headers"
(though you may be able to do some optimizing of this, using the POP3
TOP command, downloading just enough of each message to uniquely
identify it).
Once you have such a script (let's call it "pop3-delete.pl"), you can
hook it into mutt by creating a special "delete" macro that you would
use whenever you want to delete a message from the server as well as
from your local copy. It would look something like this:
macro index D '<pipe-message>~/.pop3-delete.pl<enter><delete-message>'
> Ideally I want mutt to add those "ids" to some dummy file, which I
> then pipe to some kind removal utility.
Or you could do that, though it seems even more roundabout than what I
was describing.
I'm not aware of any pre-existing tools to do what you're describing,
though.
Good luck!
~Kyle
- --
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
-- Winston Churchill
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