On Fri 28 May 2010 20:27:08 NZST +1200, Wesley Parish wrote:

> agreement with TelstraClear.  There was one email - no. 159 - that was 
> clearly over 5MB, that took most of an hour to download.  When I came to look 
> for it, intending of course to send its author a thick ear, I couldn't find 
> it anywhere in kmail.

Never mind. kmail is not the most reliable when it comes to indexing
mail, but then I use it with mbox, which it is clearly not supporting
well, e.g. it's unable to work our reliably when an mbox file has
changed and therefore needs to be re-indexed, let alone locking the file
when it modifies it.

You failed to say what your mailstore is. Local disk? IMAP?

By default, kmail stores everything under ~/.kde (it's easy to find),
and like every other semi-modern MUA, i.e. one with a GUI, treats your
mail as its private property to be guarded jealously from your
tinkering.

> Firstly, is there a handy grep script that can search through MBOXes?

Yes. At the shell prompt, type g r e p, followed by something smart,
like a substring of the subject line.

There's a faster way for you: use grepmail.

There's an even faster way for you: use mutt -f. It's a workhorse as
reliable as any you can get, and it never EVER fails. By comparison, you
can kick all the good-looking stuff half way to inter-galactic space.
Choose between easy to use and works well. Sad, but true.

> Secondly, this smells like an attack vector.  Download an invisible file 
> through a visible email that deletes itself ....  Does kmail have the kind of 
> vulnerability that would allow the installation of a privilege-excalating 
> binary?

Nobody knows, but historically it hasn't featured on the walls of shame,
or not much that I remember anyway.

> Thirdly, I was going directly in downloading my email, because of the major 
> problems I have had with Telecom's lines being unreliable, thus making it 
> difficult to sanitise my email by looking through the webmail interface.

[Telecom bla bla deleted]

It's called fetchmail. Coupled with procmail and someone with a
computer-clue it pretty rocks. Works better with a permanent connection
though. I have a script which wraps fetchmail, and runs when *I* say it
(not fetchmail wants to), and which carefully logs fetchmail's activity.
Happy to give out copies BUT it's not in releasable state, i.e. needs
local adaptation work (mainly editing constants).

Volker

-- 
Volker Kuhlmann
http://volker.dnsalias.net/     Please do not CC list postings to me.

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