python script as an emergency mailbox cleaner

[Phil Weldon]

Inboxer for Outlook is a plugin written with Python that will analyze
collections of what you consider legitimate e-mail and and what you consider
illegitimate e-mail.  I downloaded it and ran it against a collection of
1500 messages generated by the Worm.Automat.AHB and 265 the latest
legitimate e-mails I've received.  After the analysis, Inboxer has detected
about 250 Worm.Automat.AHB generated messages with no false negatives and no
false positives (granted there were only three new legitimate e-mails.

Phil Weldon

"Alex Martelli" <aleax at aleax.it> wrote in message
news:G6Zab.127313$R32.3854946 at news2.tin.it...
> All my mailboxes have been filling up with files of about 130k to 150k, no
> doubt copies of some immensely popular virus.  So, I've no doubt lost lots
> of real mail because of "mailbox full" conditions (the proliferating fake
> bounce messages more or less ensure nobody knows their mail to me has
> bounced, either).
>
> As an emergency response I and Anna developed, over the last half hour, a
> small Python script to be run from cron every few minutes and
automatically
> scrub any POP3 mailbox from files in the target size range.  I'm saving
them
> to a local file for potential later perusal, but that's obviously easy to
> comment out if needed.  Here's the tiny script in question...:
>
> import poplib
> import time
>
> print 'Start at', time.asctime()
>
> host = 'pop.mail.yahoo.com'
> port = 110
> user = 'aleaxit'
> pasw = 'secret'
>
> logfilename = 'bigjunk'
> minsize = 130000
> maxsize = 180000
> fromtag = 'From aleaxit at yahoo.com  %s\n'
>
> ps = poplib.POP3(host, port)
> ps.user(user)
> ps.pass_(pasw)
>
> messages = ps.list()
> print '%d messages, %d bytes' % (len(messages[1]), messages[-1])
>
> logfile = open(logfilename, 'a')
>
> for sms in messages[1]:
>     sid, ssize = sms.split()
>     if minsize <= int(ssize) < maxsize:
>         message = ps.retr(sid)
>         print 'retrieving and deleting msg#%s, %d bytes, %d lines' % (
>             sid, message[-1], len(message[1]))
>         logfile.write(fromtag % time.asctime())
>         for line in message[1]:
>             logfile.write(line)
>             logfile.write("\n")
>         logfile.write('\n')
>         ps.dele(sid)
>
> ps.quit()
>
> print 'Done at', time.asctime()
> print
>
>
> Hope it can come in useful to somebody...!!!
>
> Alex & Anna
>