Getting recent mail from pop3 server with >100k messages?

[G]

Looking to get a specific email from my pop3 server, sent in the last few days (or so I hope, it may not have been sent). This is one I haven't used for a while and has over 100,000 emails on it, mostly spam of course.

I've tried gmail, but it says too many messages.
My normal webmail can't seem to hack it.

I can telnet into it (some of the time), but it seems pop commands are rather limited.
It seems you can only retrieve a single message at a time, so, so far the only option seems to be to retrieve the messages by requesting them one at a time. I can dump the output to a file and search through that, but it's far from ideal.

[Alexio]

That's rather unlucky. If it were me that's what I would do, dump them to file and search. Surely that isn't much different from finding a computer to download the emails to and then use an email client to do the searching through anyway?
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will never give up his CG. I look at my fuel gauge more as a progress bar than a fuel gauge.
G: With my GSXR I do often effectively use it as a scooter with a clutch in town.
ms51ves3: why does it need 500 miles? Are you teaching it how to be a piston?

[G]

But generally email clients will start from the beginning of the list - I want it to start from the end, to avoid getting the last year's worth of spam too!
Because you can only download one email at a time, I'd have to write the commands out to download each email individually. I'm not sure how well it caches commands either, though doing three at once did seem to provide three emails, however entering login credentials as one failed.
Unfortunately I can't get back in now, as it's saying 'lock. Mailbox in use' (I presume this is incoming mail).

[Alexio]

I admit pop servers I have never delt with before, but by dump to file I was thinking along the lines of having file system access to the database files where the emails are stored and then searching through - like, literally through the file for ASCII etc as if it were a binary file. I don't know how practical that would be but that would be the pro's way

Otherwise, it sounds fairly straight forward to sync an email client, it might just take some time?
____________________
will never give up his CG. I look at my fuel gauge more as a progress bar than a fuel gauge.
G: With my GSXR I do often effectively use it as a scooter with a clutch in town.
ms51ves3: why does it need 500 miles? Are you teaching it how to be a piston?

[panrider_uk]

Can you access it via imap instead of pop?

Mark
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Current bikes: Honda ST1100 Pan European. Moto Guzzi V85 TT Travel

[Bendy]

I'd use a client, set it to only get the headers and let it chug over the weekend. You can then delete all the old crap off the server too.

[G]

Alexio - have been reminded I do have file system access, so am doing that now. My tail | grep is taking rather a long time, but as it’s almost a 900mb file it’s also going to be a bit of time to download and do it locally too.
It’s actually basically stored in a single text file, so easy to manipulate, but not the fastest – a ‘proper’ database would make it a lot easier.

Panrider – pretty sure I can’t.

Yea, could do Bendy and will resort to that if all else fails.

Any suggestions on better text searching commands than a combo of tail and grep, or a command line email client with more options than PINE ?

[Alexio]

[G]

Now sorted, ta for the thoughts all .
Tail wasn't working due to a 'picnic' situation - plenty fast enough when I did it right .
Ended up just tail'ing it, finding the line numbers of the last dates I wanted and copying it locally from the terminal window.

[bazza]

For future reference - Fetchmail.
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"That's it. You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college."
'98 Ducati 750SS, '08 Suzuki GSX650F ©2004-2014, Bazza's Harmless Banter

[G]

Cheers, though a quick scan doesn't reveal that it can retrieve messages from the end first, or from a specific date. However, quite possible it's in there as there's lots of info/configuration options.
No doubt it would have got mail quicker that outlook or whatever regardless.