After about two days, so many messages accumulate that it is in practice very hard to retrieve them, because in the middle of doing so the dialup connection will probably die, causing a lack-of-graceful-exit condition, so the mail server will think I did not get those messages, and will offer them to me again. And again. If it's been a couple of days since the last successful mail pull, it can take four or five tries to finally clear out the mailbox on the server. A couple of days more, and the mailbox will fill up to the quota, resulting in (hopefully) temporary failures on incoming messages, which at *BEST* will result in my eventually getting things all very badly mixed up and out of order, and at worst can result in my being silently unsubscribed from mailing lists.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# Okay, nothin' fancy, just grab my mail and store it on disk:
use Mail::POP3Client;
use DateTime;
use DateTime::Format::Mail;
use File::Spec::Functions;
my $basedir = '/home/jonadab/mail-proxy/store';
my $EOL = "\015\012";

my $pop = new Mail::POP3Client( USER     => "jonadab",
                                PASSWORD => "[secret]",
                                HOST     => "mail.bright.net" );
$pop->Connect();

my $cnt = $pop->Count();
if ($cnt) {
  print "The server has $cnt messages for me.\n";
  my $now = DateTime->now();
  my $nowdir = catfile($basedir, $now->ymd() . '_' . $now->hour() . $n
+ow->minute() . $now->second());
  my $nowrcvd = DateTime::Format::Mail->new()->format_datetime($now);
  while (-e $nowdir) { my @c = qw(hai lou qan xi cho nau); $nowdir .= 
+$c[rand @c]; }
  mkdir $nowdir;
  for my $num (1..$cnt) {
    print "."; print "\n" if not $cnt % 60;
    my $file = catfile($nowdir, $num);
    my $content = $pop->Retrieve($num);
    if ($content and (open MAIL, '>', $file)) {
      print MAIL "Received: from mail.bright.net by $0; $now$EOL";
      print MAIL $content;
      close MAIL;
      $pop->Delete($num);
    }
  }
  $pop->Close();
}
[download]

Caveat: the above does not attempt to handle Unicode correctly, because I do not need that functionality. The only language I get non-spam mail in is English. YMMV.

Update: no, that's not my real password.