PopFlush: Cleaning Out Your Mailbox
PopFlush is a very simple program (at least until I get more time to work
on it). It will clean some or all messages out of your POP3 mailbox. It
can be run from the command line, or as a CGI program on your web server.
Command Line
To run it from the command line, you must specify the following arguments
in the following order:
-
pop server: The hostname or IP address of your (or your ISP's) POP3 server.
-
pop username: The username which you use to login to the POP3 server, often
the same as the username part of your email address (if your email address is
tammy@isp.net, your pop username is probably "tammy").
-
pop password: This may or may not be the same as the password you use to
connect to your ISP, but it generally has to be entered in your email software.
Optional arguments (must be entered before the pop server name):
-
-v Run with verbose output (show POP3 login banner, etc.)
Additional "-v" arguments will increase the amount of output.
-
-d Actually delete messages. Without this argument, no messages will
be deleted. Either -d or -s must be present.
-
-s Only show status of mailbox (e.g. how many messages). If this
argument is present, no email messages will be deleted.
-
-eprog Run prog as a process, feeding the current message
via standrd input, in order to decide whether this message should be deleted.
If the process exits with 0 status, the message will be deleted. If the
process exits with non-zero status (or the process could not be started),
the message is kept.
-
-tN In addition to the header, feed the first N lines
of the message body to to prog (see above).
CGI-Bin Usage
PopFlush can also be run from a web form. See an
example of it's use on our server (please don't use it a lot, as we have
a slow connection to the Internet). The example HTML file is included with all
the downloadable files, so you can refer to it for usage (variable names must be
kept the same). Note that the CGI version does not support filter programs.
Downloads
- Version 0.2 (officially released Jan. 15, 2004)
- Version 0.1 (first released version; no support for "-e" or "-t",
and "-d" was implied if "-s" was not present).
License
PopFlush is currently offered under the GPL (GNU Public License). I may
at some point switch to some version of the BSD license, if there is sufficient
demand. The author is Vicky Staubly.
To Do
In future releases, I'd like to add more options about which messages to delete.
For example, ones over a certain size, or ones with a particular word or phrase
in one of the email headers (to, from, subject, etc.).