Question:
I sent myself a large file (as an attachment) from my work to my home
PC without realising quite how big it was (26 Mb!). My home
connection is only a 56kbs modem, so a file that big would take about
2 hours to download. My e-mail program (Outlook Express- no snide
remarks please) doesn't seem to want to delete this before it
downloads it, which seems an arse-about-face way of doing it.
Is there any way to remove a particular e-mail without downloading it?
As you're on FreeUK you can go to the FreeUK homepage, log onto the
webmail service and delete it from there.
I expect you have sorted this by now but there is an option in the Inbox Assistant (which is probably called summat else on OE5) to delete/leave on the server files larger than 'n' KB.
A very reasonable disclaimer from the contributor of the next bit:
"if you don't feel confident that you have a reasonable idea of what you're doing, you shouldn't be doing this"...
If you use pop3 to collect mail - you almost certainly do - you can
delete mail directly from the server without having to use any
webmail, mail client options, or anything else. The procedure is
this:
You Will Need:
* The name of your POP3 server. This will be somewhere in your mail
program's configuration. Example: pop3.demon.co.uk .
* Your POP3 username and password. Again, probably in mail program
configuration.
* A Telnet program. Standard on Unix systems; may be present on Macs;
lousy version on Windows, get TeraTerm instead (free).
Procedure:
Connect, via telnet, to port 110 on the pop3 server. (Precise means
of doing this will vary depending on your telnet program.) Note that anything you type after this point _may_ not be sent back to the screen - it depends on your telnet program, again.
Type: user (username)
You should see: +OK (may be some other text here)
Type: pass (password)
You should see: +OK (may be some other text here)
If either of these doesn't come back with "+OK", start again from
"user".
Type: list
You should see:
1 nnnn
2 nnnn
(etc.)
where nnnn is the message size. (If there are lots of messages and you
can't scroll back, "list N" where N is a message number will produce
"+OK N nnnn" where nnnn is the message size.) From this, you should have a list of message numbers that are candidates for deletion.
For each message number, which I'll call N:
top N 0
will show you the headers of that message.
dele N
will delete the message.
When you've finished, type "quit" - this is very important, as otherwise the deletions may not actually apply.
Last updated
February 16th 2004
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