Code for remote E-mail cleaning?

[James Britt]

I've discovered that, for all its good points, the Mozilla Thunderbird
E-mail client is braindead when it comes to malformed mail headers. It
seems that if an inbox contains any mail with a bad header, then
Thunderbird simply stops fetching more mail from that inbox. Period.

One then has to manually delete the offending message.

I can think of any number of ways to get around this, and do not really
want a litany of which mail reader is the best. Rather, I'm curious to
know if anyone has or knows of a simple Ruby app that can connect to a
mailbox, inspect the messages, and delete any mail that meets some
criteria (including dubious headers) while leaving the rest alone.

In the long run I need to get some spam filtering running on the mail
server, but short term it would be nice to essentially automate what I'm
doing now via web mail.

I'm inclined to think that writing such an app would not be too hard;
I've written some basic mail fetchers using some available libs, but
would rather not reinvent the wheel. I also want to be sure that I do
not accidentally mark mail as read while processing messages.

Thanks,


James

 

[Randy W. Sims]

I've discovered that, for all its good points, the Mozilla Thunderbird
E-mail client is braindead when it comes to malformed mail headers. It
seems that if an inbox contains any mail with a bad header, then
Thunderbird simply stops fetching more mail from that inbox. Period.

One then has to manually delete the offending message.

I ran in to this same problem with the Mozilla suite on some newsgroups.
Giganews was able to fix it on their end, but the Mozilla team hasn't
responded to the problem. Mozilla should idealy be able to work around
the bad headers.

You can see my report at:
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261495>

Randy.

 

[James Britt]

I ran in to this same problem with the Mozilla suite on some newsgroups.
Giganews was able to fix it on their end, but the Mozilla team hasn't
responded to the problem. Mozilla should idealy be able to work around
the bad headers.

You can see my report at:
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261495>

Thanks. I've seen assorted bug reports for this, but no indication that
the Mozilla team will be fixing it any time soon. So, in the meantime,
I'm looking for a hack.

James

 

[William Park]

I've discovered that, for all its good points, the Mozilla Thunderbird
E-mail client is braindead when it comes to malformed mail headers. It
seems that if an inbox contains any mail with a bad header, then
Thunderbird simply stops fetching more mail from that inbox. Period.

One then has to manually delete the offending message.

I can think of any number of ways to get around this, and do not really
want a litany of which mail reader is the best. Rather, I'm curious to
know if anyone has or knows of a simple Ruby app that can connect to a
mailbox, inspect the messages, and delete any mail that meets some
criteria (including dubious headers) while leaving the rest alone.

In the long run I need to get some spam filtering running on the mail
server, but short term it would be nice to essentially automate what I'm
doing now via web mail.

I'm inclined to think that writing such an app would not be too hard;
I've written some basic mail fetchers using some available libs, but
would rather not reinvent the wheel. I also want to be sure that I do
not accidentally mark mail as read while processing messages.

Perhaps you can something useful in
http://freshmeat.net/projects/popchecksh/
At the moment, it's shell script designed to delete Swen/Netsky worms
on POP3 server. But, you can delete anything you want, really.