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

Ron Wickersham rjw at alembic.com
Wed Apr 7 14:25:28 PDT 2004


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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