I enjoy writing small Perl scripts to perform admin tasks.

A couple of days ago I had to delete more than 3000 messages in an email inbox, relaying only on POP3 to do it.

Issuing 3000+ dele commands by hand was not a very desirable prospect, so I performed a CPAN search looking for POP3-handling modules.

Bingo! Mail::Box::POP3 does the trick nicely. And it was already installed in my debian box, so I could proceed immediately:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.010;
use warnings;
use strict;

use Mail::Box::POP3;

my $pop = Mail::Box::POP3->new(
    access      => 'rw',
    trace       => 'DEBUG',
    type        => 'pop3',
    username    => 'someuser',
    password    => 'somepass',
    server_name => 'pop3.whatever.server.example'
) or die "Cannot connect: $!";

$_->delete for $pop->messages;

Once $pop is created, the connetion is established with the server, and the message list (headers only) is loaded into the object, and available through the ‘messages’ method.

A simple ‘for’ iterates through the list, and deletes every sucker.

Nice and sweet.