Upcoming inaccessibility

Jed

September 22, 2003

On Wednesday, I'll be flying off to the east coast for three weeks.

Which means (among other things) that my Net access will be somewhat limited. I suspect that for much of that time I'll be using dialup when I can get online at all, and only for brief periods.

Which would be okay, except for the W32.Swen.A@mm worm. In the past eight hours, I received over 80 emails from the worm, each having a 100K attachment (at least, I think all the attachments are that large). 8MB worth of attachments overnight; if that continues at the same rate, that's roughly 24MB of attachments a day; if I can only check mail every couple of days, that's about 50MB of attachments to download over a 56K modem. Which means it'll probably take a couple of hours just to download my mail. And I don't know if I'll have enough online time to do that.

I may try and implement some way to delete the attachments as they come in, before the point where I download them, but I don't know if I can do that. We'll see.

Anyway, the real point is that I may be awfully inaccessible via email until this worm's activity slows down. I'd been figuring it would calm down soon, but it seems to be as active as ever.

6 Responses to “Upcoming inaccessibility”

Jay Lake

09-22-2003 12:51 PM

I’ve got Pine shoving everything with an attachment into a separate folder using a filtering rule. That keeps the inbox clean for normal messages, and I can sweep the attachment folder when I feel like it.
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Jed

09-22-2003 1:34 PM

Yeah, that works fine if you’re using a mailer that runs directly on the server, like Pine. I use Eudora, which downloads the mail to my local system before I read it. That’s normally great for traveling—I can read and reply to mail without actually being connected, after the initial download—but is a big problem when there’s this many bytes involved.

But your comment does suggest a solution: I can use the mailreader on the server to get rid of the worm-laden messages before I download the rest. Thanks!
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Joe

09-22-2003 1:38 PM

Can you use IMAP instead of POP for your mail? If you’re using IMAP, it will download all the message headers when you check your mail, and will only download the bodies of messages you actually open. I know that Eudora supports IMAP; does your mail server?
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Celia

09-22-2003 2:16 PM

Mailwasher. It’s a POP type spamfilter that lets you browse the messages before deleting them or downloading them. And it’s free for one address, or free for 30 days for multiple addresses.
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Dan

09-22-2003 6:00 PM

Eudora has an option to skip messages over a certain size… it should be on the Checking Mail preference panel. Your reality may differ — I’m looking at the PC version of Eudora right now, where the options are purposelessly rearranged from their locations in the Mac version.
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David D. Levine

09-22-2003 8:24 PM

You can configure Eudora to download only the first part of each message, then select specific messages to download or delete. See http://www.eudora.com/techsupport/tutorials/mac_fetch.html for details.

You can also use mailreader.com (specifically http://mailreader.com/mr2/cgi-bin/nph-mr.cgi) to review and delete messages on the server. It’s a free, open-source, web-based POP mailreader and I like it a lot.
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