William Reardon’s Blog

I managed to do the electronic equivalent of hitting your thumb with a hammer today. In making a 15 minute change to someone else’s script, I managed to mail bomb myself in testing it. And not just once. Three times. And at about 20,000 emails a pop. (No pun intended – I use IMAP.)

Now running a script that shoots yourself in the head like that can take a few minutes to run. So what do you do in the mean time? Check your email. Of course, with a slow relay, you don’t really know a shit-storm of mail is just on the horizon. You just see a few dozen or so unread messages, the first with an attachment.

One of the reasons I use IMAP is so that I can use mutt for email the vast majority of times, but for those emails with attachments, I can fire up Thunderbird over on my windows box.

And in the time it takes to do all that, of course, those 60,000+ messages have all arrived.

And they confuse bejesus out of Thunderbird.

So Thunderbird sees these 60k messages, freaks out, gives a primordial scream worthy of Howard Dean, and starts to download them all. Not sync them. Download them. As in remove them from the original server. As in remove them from my unix mail spool. mutt confirms this with a “Mail spool external modified” and politely updating it’s screen to show 0 messages.

Owww.

Luckily Thunderbird uses Berkeley mailbox, so I can move it back over to unix and start to weed threw it. The status of each message – read, unread, etc. is lost. Also, for a variety reasons, those 60,000 messages aren’t easy matched or found by any single pattern. So several hours later of manually digging, searching, and deleting I finally have my email back.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2004 at 11:19 pm and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.