This weekend we had a runaway email endless loop. When it was killed after 18 hours, my inbox had 135,000 messages in it...there were two messages that were being endlessly sent and bounced and I'm on the postmaster alias. Thunderbird was able to do a mass select of one of the two messages, and deleted 65,000, but after that it locked up. I ended up firing up Pine to do the final 65,000...whereas TBird had had mulitple imap sessions (and failed), Pine only had one and did the job. And even after I had done the mass delete of the other 65,000 and the inbox was down to 2000 messages, TBird was still hiding under the covers and telling me there were still 135,000 messages. In the end, I had to kill the TBird profile for that account and recreate it. Is there a simple robust IMAP client to replace Pine (which I *think* is no longer supported)? GUI or TTY session? I'm wondering if there is something we can tell users to use when Things Are Dire. GUI would be better since it removes one of the few remaining reasons for a logon server -- ==== Once upon a time, the Internet was a friendly, neighbors-helping-neighbors small town, and no one locked their doors. Now it's like an apartment in Bed-Stuy: you need three heavy duty pick-proof locks, one of those braces that goes from the lock to the floor, and bars on the windows.... ==== Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Bard College, New York 12504 sdean at bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
Stewart Dean wrote:> This weekend we had a runaway email endless loop. When it was killed > after 18 hours, my inbox had 135,000 messages in it...there were two > messages that were being endlessly sent and bounced and I'm on the > postmaster alias. Thunderbird was able to do a mass select of one of > the two messages, and deleted 65,000, but after that it locked up. I > ended up firing up Pine to do the final 65,000...whereas TBird had had > mulitple imap sessions (and failed), Pine only had one and did the job. > And even after I had done the mass delete of the other 65,000 and the > inbox was down to 2000 messages, TBird was still hiding under the > covers and telling me there were still 135,000 messages. In the end, > I had to kill the TBird profile for that account and recreate it. > > Is there a simple robust IMAP client to replace Pine (which I *think* > is no longer supported)? GUI or TTY session? > > I'm wondering if there is something we can tell users to use when > Things Are Dire. GUI would be better since it removes one of the few > remaining reasons for a logon serverI think Evolution handles large bundles of mail really well - though on Windows it's a bit of a mess of an application. It doesn't do single large messages very quickly though. Alternately, if you're using Maildir, you could always grep and rm. Rick
* Stewart Dean <sdean at bard.edu>:> This weekend we had a runaway email endless loop. When it was killed > after 18 hours, my inbox had 135,000 messages in it...there were two > messages that were being endlessly sent and bounced and I'm on the > postmaster alias. Thunderbird was able to do a mass select of one of > the two messages, and deleted 65,000, but after that it locked up. I > ended up firing up Pine to do the final 65,000...whereas TBird had had > mulitple imap sessions (and failed), Pine only had one and did the job. > And even after I had done the mass delete of the other 65,000 and the > inbox was down to 2000 messages, TBird was still hiding under the covers > and telling me there were still 135,000 messages. In the end, I had to > kill the TBird profile for that account and recreate it. > > Is there a simple robust IMAP client to replace Pine (which I *think* is > no longer supported)? GUI or TTY session?I use mutt to do IMAP and SMTP and I like it. YMMV... p at rick -- state of mind Agentur f?r Kommunikation, Design und Softwareentwicklung Patrick Koetter Tel: 089 45227227 Echinger Strasse 3 Fax: 089 45227226 85386 Eching Web: http://www.state-of-mind.de Amtsgericht M?nchen Partnerschaftsregister PR 563
Stewart Dean schrieb:> This weekend we had a runaway email endless loop. When it was killed > after 18 hours, my inbox had 135,000 messages in it...there were two > messages that were being endlessly sent and bounced and I'm on the > postmaster alias. Thunderbird was able to do a mass select of one of > the two messages, and deleted 65,000, but after that it locked up. I > ended up firing up Pine to do the final 65,000...whereas TBird had had > mulitple imap sessions (and failed), Pine only had one and did the job. > And even after I had done the mass delete of the other 65,000 and the > inbox was down to 2000 messages, TBird was still hiding under the covers > and telling me there were still 135,000 messages. In the end, I had to > kill the TBird profile for that account and recreate it. > > Is there a simple robust IMAP client to replace Pine (which I *think* is > no longer supported)? GUI or TTY session?alpine, the official successor of pine: http://www.washington.edu/alpine/
Hi> This weekend we had a runaway email endless loop. When it was killed > after 18 hours, my inbox had 135,000 messages in it...there were two > messages that were being endlessly sent and bounced and I'm on the > postmaster alias.By far the fastest option is to simply use a tool which can examine the file system and delete - eg SSH. (try winscp on windows if you want a gui...)> Thunderbird was able to do a mass select of one of the two messages, > and deleted 65,000, but after that it locked up. I ended up firing up > Pine to do the final 65,000...whereas TBird had had mulitple imap > sessions (and failed), Pine only had one and did the job. > And even after I had done the mass delete of the other 65,000 and the > inbox was down to 2000 messages, TBird was still hiding under the > covers and telling me there were still 135,000 messages. In the end, > I had to kill the TBird profile for that account and recreate it.To be fair to tbird - probably what happened was that it was shuffling lots of delete commands to the backend server. When you "cheated" and used another tool, it was then doing it's sync to discover which messages were deleted. Unless you have a VERY fast internet connection then be aware that the commands it uses to check for new messages could actually take multiple minutes to execute and many more while it deletes from the local offline index. Basically it's a good little program but not really optimised for this requirement> I'm wondering if there is something we can tell users to use when > Things Are Dire. GUI would be better since it removes one of the few > remaining reasons for a logon serverYou might want to consider scripting a little perl micro interface? I saw someone once write a very basic curses mail client in perl (ruby, etc would also be fine, nothing magic about perl) and for the kind of use case you have in mind something like a "delete by user" or "delete by message_id" might be helpful? Additionally consider adding some protection against mail loops to your server - it used to be de-riguer back in the procmail days, but something as simple as checking for an "X-Been-Here" on any auto generated content is a good first start. Your choice of MDA is likely to determine the exact favoured approach. Auto "out of the office" responders should definitely only notify every X days as well to help with this kind of thing. Finally checking for the mandatory headers that all auto generated stuff should create should help... Good luck Ed W
> Is there a simple robust IMAP clientYes: mutt. One of the reasons we use mutt not only for regular mail access, but for troubleshooting: it simply does what you tell it to do. It doesn't try to be clever or try to do what it thinks you actually wanted to do. Apart from that, it's scriptable and heavily configurable. And autoview (combined with metamail and copiousoutput) lets you almost forget people sending you html-only or M$-doc-only mails.> to replace Pine (which I *think* is no longer supported)?Alpine?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 12:45:13PM -0500, Stewart Dean wrote: [...]> Is there a simple robust IMAP client to replace Pine (which I *think* is no > longer supported)? GUI or TTY session?I switched from Pine to Mutt (quite a while ago) and to me, Mutt is like Pine but a lot faster. OK, there are some features added ;-) Regards - -- tom?s -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFJRz/qBcgs9XrR2kYRAsGcAJ42hWRQMgEewhV7owTJdATRyo2x+gCfb83T ibP1axKWwEuQH7PiaDVP9/g=cNZ3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 12:45 -0500, Stewart Dean wrote:> Is there a simple robust IMAP client to replace Pine (which I *think* is > no longer supported)? GUI or TTY session?Pine and Alpine are about the only clients (besides webmails) that can open a mailbox without downloading every single message's headers at startup. So they're probably the only clients where you can quickly open a huge mailbox and start deleting messages. I wish there were more clients that worked like that. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 197 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20081216/720736b9/attachment-0002.bin>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Mon, 15 Dec 2008, Stewart Dean wrote:> telling me there were still 135,000 messages. In the end, I had to kill the > TBird profile for that account and recreate it.Yeah, the first and only time I opened the Postmaster mailbox with Thunderbird, it nearly rendered a Dual Core2 useless. Putting strace on it revealed, that Tbird was working with its message cache endlessly. I really waited till it finished, but to delete anything was even worse. The internal cache file is not designed for that many mails, I guess.> Is there a simple robust IMAP client to replace Pine (which I *think* is no > longer supported)? GUI or TTY session?:-) Yes, I never read Postmaster's mail box with Thunderbird. Pine has been replaced by Alpine, as others pointing out and works unproblematicly with Dovecot, regardless of how many mails there are, as long as Dovecot keeps up. Mutt works, too. Although I don't like the input chars (same old vi vs. emacs adiction), it is far better than pine when running on the Maildir natively bypassing IMAP. After training, mutt should be more powerful than pine. Both Mutt and Pine are superior in these emergency situations, because they do not cache the mail info locally, before they prompt the user. I guess, you can use any other client doing the same.> I'm wondering if there is something we can tell users to use when Things Are > Dire. GUI would be better since it removes one of the few remaining reasons > for a logon serverWell, the combination of mutt and server logon will work for any desaster case IMO. Bye, - -- Steffen Kaiser -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFJR2kCVJMDrex4hCIRAvobAJsFjy/XRuOWQna21MBoRLQle1WsswCggdii WqLoNUvWcjZvdhjO8/ufXuo=6kz3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Words by Timo Sirainen [Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 08:17:11AM +0200]:> On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 12:45 -0500, Stewart Dean wrote: > > Is there a simple robust IMAP client to replace Pine (which I *think* is > > no longer supported)? GUI or TTY session? > > Pine and Alpine are about the only clients (besides webmails) that can > open a mailbox without downloading every single message's headers at > startup. So they're probably the only clients where you can quickly open > a huge mailbox and start deleting messages. I wish there were more > clients that worked like that. >Mutt also has header caching. Just compile it with --enable-hcache Enable header caching -- Jose Celestino | http://japc.uncovering.org/files/japc-pgpkey.asc ---------------------------------------------------------------- "One man?s theology is another man?s belly laugh." -- Robert A. Heinlein
On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:45:13 -0500 Stewart Dean <sdean at bard.edu> wrote:> Is there a simple robust IMAP client to replace Pine (which I *think* > is no longer supported)? GUI or TTY session? > > I'm wondering if there is something we can tell users to use when > Things Are Dire. GUI would be better since it removes one of the few > remaining reasons for a logon serverGUIwise, I have been using Sylpheed for years, both personally and professionally, and I believe it to be the best GUI-type IMAP client around. It too does the header caching and other stuff mentioned but, compared with Thunderbird, it has: . always performed "better" (i.e., faster) . never crashed (AFAICR) Bling-wise, it's a bit poor, but it gets the job done. M?rio Barbosa