www.ilpiola.it
Roberto Piola
Work
Freebies

popdel

popdel is a simple java program that can be used in order to delete old mail from a POP3 server.

The need for this program came from a customer who wanted a limitation on some of its mailboxes: the messages older than 15 days had to be deleted. Some mail servers have this option, but many have not it.

So, I wrote this program that opens the user mailbox via the POP3 protocol, reads the messages and selectively deletes those that are more than a user-definable age (the age is computed by comparing the current system date and the Date: field of the message header).

The compiled version of the program is freely downloadable as popdel.class (3kb), and must be run as

<your JVM> popdel <name of the POP3 server> <name of the user/mailbox> <password> <number of days>

(<your JVM> is usually either java or jview).

It is advisable to run popdel from the same machine that hosts the POP3 server, or from a machine connected in LAN.

If you want a continuous check of a group of maiboxes, you can insert a batch of popdel calls in the system scheduler (crontab under unix, at /every under Windows NT).

The commented source code is available for the sum of 20 Euro; please write me if you are interested.