[conspire] Linux program to remove mail from server?

[Edmund J. Biow]

On Wednesday 27 April 2005 19:33, Ross Bernheim wrote:

> One of the great complaints that I hear about the OS X interface is all
> the eye candy. I agree that some of it is excessive,

I have to agree.  My only experience with OSX was helping an older 
friend configure here expensive Airport and Emac to work with her 
husband's Windows system.  The thing cost 3 times as much as a PC that 
would have been much faster.  Despite having a 733 MHz CPU, it was 
pig-slow because all the eye candy (the thing that annoyed me the most 
was the undulating & dissappearing Taskbar equivalent).  With Windows 
and Linux I know how to turn all those quasi-transparent animated & 
shadowed thingamabobs off, but I had no idea how to do so with the Mac 
(the settings were all really buried, so they resisted my initial 
efforts & I didn't have time to Google around). 

What's more, esthetic concerns trumped functionality in a way that I 
found absolutely vexing.  The peripheral connectors were out of the way 
on the side of the machine.  Working on the innards looked like it would 
be a PITA, not that I needed to open the box up.  The thing shipped with 
a cute transparent 1 button mouse, forchristsakes.  No scroll, no 
context menu.  Sure, it looked spiffy, but it is a piece of hardware, 
not art.  Form follows function.  I gave her a cheap $3 Gateway scroll 
USB mouse and she was much happier.

Moreover, I've heard from a Mac user friend that Macs these days are 
mostly just commodity hardware, except for the CPU.  PCI cards, standard 
PC memory, IDE drives. I.e., nothing special. My buddy has had at least 
as much trouble with his G3 as I've had with any three of my systems and 
it & its peripherals cost him far more than all three of those computers 
cost me to build.  And despite him spending thousands on the box (and 
bearing in mind the fact that Macs retain value far longer than PCs) it 
is still only a 266 MHz machine and ending its useful life as a desktop 
computer.

I think the future of computing in most of the world is reliable free 
software (though not necessarily Linux) on cheap commodity hardware.  
But then again, as someone once said "Brazil is the country of the 
future and always will be!"

On Wednesday 27 April 2005 19:46, Rick Moen wrote:

>Edward described a
>classic situation plainly calling for simple scripting -- a laundry-list
>of POP3 sites to have bulk delete operations performed on them -- but
>he then rejected out of hand a number of utilities probably suitable to
>his problem because they aren't "GUI".
>  
>
Rick, for you it is simple scripting.  For someone who is not a member 
of the priesthood it is a weeks-long learning project.    While a 
console would work fine to implement some sort of filter, what I want is 
to see a list of my email headers, then select the ones I want to delete 
and remove them from the server.  Even if I could write a script that 
would poll my pop3 servers and print the headers to a console, I'm not 
immediately seeing how I'd then tell the computer to delete numbers 3, 
8, 12, 16-18 & 24 without typing all those numbers in and issuing a 
delete command. I'd find it a lot faster to hold down the Control button 
and mouse my way over a list using the widgets that god provided for our 
edification. 

For me this sort of scripting exercise doesn't seem like the best use of 
my scarce screwing-around time, especially if there is a way to 
accomplish my task that doesn't require what would be for me heroic 
measures.  I'd rather rather spend that time teaching myself IMAP and 
Fetchmail, like Bill suggested.

Edmund