Email::Delete trouble.

superfrink has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Currently spam is being send with the From header set to a bunch of random letters at mydomain. I have a catch-all and I have received over 2200 bounces in the past 12 hours.

I wrote a quick script using Email::Delete to remove the messages from my inbox. The script runs but only process a couple subject lines before hanging. After a few minutes I kill the process with ctrl-c. The code is:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Email::Delete qw(delete_message);

my @subject_list = (
  '^Delivery Status Notification.*$' ,
  '^Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender$' ,
  '^failure notice$' ,
  '^DELIVERY FAILURE.*$' ,
  '^Undeliverable:.*$' ,
  '^Returned mail: see transcript for deta.*' ,
);

foreach my $subject (@subject_list) {

    print $subject , "\n";

    delete_message from     => '/home/chad/Mailbox',
                   matching => sub {
                       my $message = shift;
                       $message->header('Subject') =~ m/$subject/;
    };

}
[download]

The output is:

$ perl remove-bounce-emails.pl
^Delivery Status Notification.*$
^Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender$
^failure notice$

$ perl remove-bounce-emails.pl
^Delivery Status Notification.*$
^Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender$
[download]

Any idea why the program is hanging? top shows the process using next to no CPU time and very little memory.

Comment on Email::Delete trouble. Select or Download Code

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Re: Email::Delete trouble. by Krambambuli (Curate) on Oct 25, 2007 at 20:42 UTC
Any idea why the program is hanging? top shows the process using next to no CPU time and very little memory. I'd suspect a locking problem; have you made sure that no other mail-related process is trying to access the mailbox while you're deleting the unwanted messages ? You haven't said anything about what type of OS and/or Mailbox you have. If things are happening on Linux, you might see which processes concur to access the mailbox using fuser: fuser -uv mailbox_filename Krambambuli --- enjoying Mark Jason Dominus' Higher-Order Perl	[reply]
Re: Email::Delete trouble. by superfrink (Curate) on Oct 25, 2007 at 19:24 UTC
I re-worked the script to use one regex and one call to `delete_message()` and now it runs without hanging. (I also added some more Subject line patterns to filter out.) #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use Email::Delete qw(delete_message); my @subject_list = ( '^DELIVERY FAILURE.$' , '^Delivery Notification: Delivery has failed' , '^Delivery Status Notification.$' , '^Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender' , '^Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender' , '^Message you sent blocked by our bulk email filter' , '^Returned mail: see transcript for deta.' , '^Returned mail: see transcript for details' , '^Undeliverable:.$' , '^Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender$' , '^Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender' , '^failure notice$' , 'failure notice' , ); { local $" = '\|'; print "@subject_list" , "\n"; delete_message from => '/home/chad/Mailbox', matching => sub { my $message = shift; local $" = '\|'; $message->header('Subject') =~ m/"@subject_list +"/; }; } [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]