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[fetchmail]selective flush

2001-07-26 08:30:40
Sorry to send this message without first lurking to learn the list
culture, but I have an emergency. 

Apparently my address was absorbed by the SirCam worm at a very early
date, for I'm deluged with SirCam worm messages. Of course, because I
run Linux, I'm not much concerned about infection, but the number and
size of the messages effectively blocks my e-mail communications. 

I use emacs rmail, and its mail files are tossed into user's home
directory. With dozens of SirCam worm messages that on average are 240
Kb in size, my home partition quickly filled, and that made life
difficult. So I got into the habit of adding a --limit 150000 option
to my fetchmail calls.

This worked because I rarely get legitimate files over 150
Kb. However, the worms are crawling in so fast now that my email
account on my ISP's mail server is filling (25 Mb), so that I wake up
in the morning and have to go through a tedious process with my ISP
to expunge the worms from the server. I mention all this because it is
one way that Linux is not entirely immune from viri.

If I leave all the worms on the server, I loose e-mail over night; if
I download them, I loose mail at this end. Ideally I would like to
configure fetchmail to mark as read and flush without downloading any
files over a certain size. But the manual does not seem to tell me how
to do this. 

If fetchmail can't do it, can anyone tell me of a simple utility that
would access and manipulate the attributes of mail files on the mail
server? I.e., mark for deletion any mail file over a certain
size. Such a utility sounds simple, but I've so far not been able to
find one. 

-- 
    Haines Brown
      brownh(_at_)hartford-hwp(_dot_)com
      www.hartford-hwp.com
      KB1GRM    



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