The Eclectic Technologist

Have you tried Eclipse Web Standard Tools (WST)? It is really nice! It has great support for editing a number of different types of files, including XML and XSD. It has a nice SQL query tool that works with any JDBC enabled database. It even creates Web service clients with a simple right-click on a WSDL file!

Installation requires three other plugins, and Eclipse SDK proper.

Labor day was a very slow day for email, or so it seemed. I got nothing, no response from previous emails, not even spam! This was suspicious, I couldn’t believe that every spammer was on vacation.

After a quick email from a secondary account, I got this bounce:

Recipient’s mailbox is full, message returned to sender. (#5.2.2)

I checked the mail server, but there were no messages there either. Clearly, something was configured wrong. Tech support determined there were more than 6500 emails in my inbox, but not the inbox I was looking at. It turned out that the primary email server was forwarding to a secondary email server and did not delete the originals. I was reading from the secondary email server and deleting messages, but the primary was filling up.

I logged into the primary and found that 6500 emails were received between March 2006 and September. That’s about 930 emails per month or 30 emails each day. Most of it was spam, of course.

Cleaning up my primary inbox without losing anything over the past few days was not trivial. Clicking through 300+ pages of emails would take at least half an hour. I figured I could use Thunderbird mail client to pull everything off and then sort out what I wanted to keep. I started it up and it seemed to cruise along at a reasonable clip. I figured it wouldn’t take more than an hour or so, but it didn’t. I failed to account for the non-linear distribution of email sizes. I went back to the server, sorted by email size and deleted the about 20 pages of really big emails. I guess I could have just pulled down headers only, but it wasn’t clear to me that messages would have been deleted on the server.

The POP mail client was still running on a laptop in the other room. The question of concurrency came to mind. What would the POP client do if messages were deleted from the server while it was retrieving? One would think it would just pull down what it could and keep going. When I went back to check, Thunderbird had stopped and complained that a message was missing. It didn’t seem to respond well after that. I restarted Thunderbird which took about 30 minutes to finish pulling down about 6000 remaining emails.

I’m getting spam now, so things seem to be back to normal.