[srj@adnd.com: Re: [NBLUG/talk] Mail Removal]

[Steve Johnson]

I'm not sure why the question is important but I will answer it anyways.  I
found by attaching an e-mail directly to someones spool, is considerably
fast than piping it to sendmail.

So it was an experiment that seemed to work when tested (worked for
mutt and imap) that failed.  

-Steve


On Wed, Apr 07, 2004 at 02:25:28PM -0700, Ron Wickersham wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, Steve Johnson wrote:
> 
> > ----- Forwarded message from Steve Johnson <srj at adnd.com> -----
> >
> > Ok, I understand the ethics, but when you wrote a script the f*cked
> > up 1300+ emails boxes (corrupted them) sometimes you have to throw
> > ethics out the window. :)
> >
> > Meanwhile, I wrote the script to take care of this, my please to nblug was
> > in hopes to no have to re-invent the wheel.
> >
> > <background>
> > I wrote a script that locked the spools, attached the bulk announcement to
> > the bottom of hte users spool, then unlocked the box.. Well there wasa
> > typo in the header of the text I attached, so users couldnt pop their mail
> > off the server.   Sooo I have to screw ethics, and write a scrtip to
> > nuke that paticular message out of the spool.
> >
> > Funny yhink is mutt didn't mind the farked up header.. imapd didnt
> > either.. just the pop3 daemon would choke on this.
> > </background>
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 07, 2004 at 10:56:58AM -0700, Ron Wickersham wrote:
> > > On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, Steve Johnson wrote:
> > >
> > > > We have an issue where an e-mail was sent out to about 1300 users, and I
> > > > need to remove them from their mail spools.  Not sure how I am going to do
> > > > this, does anyone by chance have a script or know of one that will
> > > > do this, maybe one where I can give it the subject and the from line and
> > > > it will go through and remove all e-mail under that criteria out
> > > > of every box in the mail spool? (/var/mail)  This is on a linux box.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.
> > > >
> > > > -Steve
> 
> hi Steve,
> 
> my response was to your original message where you referred to an e-mail
> (from an undisclosed sender) was in your 1300 user's inboxes.
> 
> but the followup shows that you carefully protected the spools while
> a script with an error appended a file to the spools, making this
> a different issue.
> 
> the question does arise, however, why would you do such a thing, as
> opposed to using your MTA (sendmail or whatever) to do the work for you.
> if there is not already a mailing list for these kinds of messages, then
> it seems to me that it would be even easier for you (not necessarily
> easier for the machine) to script reading the /var/mail directory and
> mailing the msg to each user found there thereby avoiding the opportunity
> for errors of the type that occurred.
> 
> -ron
> 
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