Re: retiring e-mail revisited

[Danny Sauer <sauer@cloudmaster.com>]

On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 08:44:08AM -0700, Robert Threet wrote:
> I've got thousands of copies of a 384k M$.DOC (I was
> asked to send) littering my /var/spool/mail.  I'm a
> little tired of backing them up and the info is now
> useless since it was time critical.
> 
> Ethical Question
> ================
> Q: Is it okay for me, the sender, to "expire" (that
> is, "delete") this message from their /var/spool/mail
> directory?

It's ethical to suggest to the user(s) that you were cleaning up
a bit, and noticed that several mail spools had old messages -
possibly followed by a suggestion that mail to be archived should
be stored elsewhere, or that you would be willing to delete some
messages that are too darned old.

Or, you could just "expire" them yourself and make something up
about how you tagged your message to delete itself aftera certain
time or something.  That'd encourage users to back stuff up elsewhere
if they wanted to keep messages...

> Technical Question
> ==================
> Q: Got a good way to do this without damaging their
> /var/spool/mail?  The idea of unleashing a really
> complex regex on 10,000 /var/spool/mail records is a
> little scary.  Hmmm... the messages all begin and end
> with "--==__==__some_number__==__"

What I usually do with a single mailbox is to use mutt.  You
can specify the spool to open up with -f, so just do a
	mutt -f /var/spool/luser
and go in to modify the mailbox as needed.  It's handy for
giving users a quick summary of messages in their inbox or
whatever if you quit with "x" so viewed messages aren't marked
as such.

If you're doing a bunch of mailboxes, there's a utility called
mailgrep that could possibly be found on freshmeat...

--Danny, who typed this a few minutes after you sent your message, and then neglected to actually *send* it. :)
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