(no subject)

[nonelvis]

Want to know what happens when you have an email account you haven't used regularly since early 2001, even if you've deleted the spam messages you saw when you logged in to the server via the command line?

You get 88,000+ spam messages trapped in the spam filter.

That's over 600Mb of spam.

I'm dying to know if I can delete it without the webmail server falling over. (It's still thinking about that right now.)

Comments

[kalleah.livejournal.com]

You get 88,000+ spam messages trapped in the spam filter.

HOLY CRAP.

[nonelvis]

Which is apparently what the webmail server said as well, since it timed out rather than deleting anything. I've filed a helpdesk ticket and fully expect the students reading it are laughing their asses off right now.

[kalleah.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed that the account didn't hit some sort of size limit. I mean ... honestly. Don't most webmail services delete filtered spam after a certain amount of time in a spam filter? Clearly, this one ought to consider that rule.

[nonelvis]

You'd think so, but this is MIT's webmail service, and they tend to err on the side of just giving everyone more server space rather than deleting stuff accidentally. My quota is 1Gb, so even with 622Mb taken up by spam, I'm still nowhere near my limit.

[mmancuso.livejournal.com]

You should send it all back. Pity you can't perform "return to sender." Like, to the top annoying person of the year.

[nonelvis]

Now, that would be a handy feature.

[iainpj.livejournal.com]

When that happened to me on my server the first time, I wound up asking tech support to purge the mailbox for me, because I couldn't open it. When it happened the second time, I discovered that having Gmail open the mailbox via POP pulled over and sorted everything. Its spam filters are shockingly good; I think out of several thousand messages, it only marked five (that I found) as spam that weren't, and there was nothing that it had decided was real mail that wasn't real mail. (Mind, that was 6000 messages, and not 88,000. And even so, I wound up having to go away and leave it alone for a couple hours, because it kept having to reconnect to pull off the messages.

So why on earth do you need to look at an account now that you haven't touched for six years, may one ask?

[nonelvis]

I've asked the Help Desk for instructions on how to empty the mailbox via the command-line, or failing that, for them to purge things for me. We'll see what happens when they respond.

I have been checking this account every week or two since I left MIT, because I'm still on a couple of mailing lists there, and every so often people email me there instead of my preferred addresses. I've been checking it much more frequently lately, though, because that's where all the email from Mystery Hunt registrants is coming in, and the Hunt starts in two weeks.