Deleting your POP3 mailbox using telnet, since Gmail doesn't do it properly :)

I'm using Gmail to check and download my Paradise (ISP) email. This means I can read (almost) all of my personal email in one place.

Gmail appears to only have one option for deleting mail: "Leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server". If you set this option it immediately deletes your mail from the POP server after downloading it to Gmail, which means that you can't check it with an alternate client.

Other mail clients allow you to leave mail on your mail server for a number of days, so I normally set this to 7 days so that if I need to fire up a different client or use my ISP's mail, then I can see recent email. Gmail doesn't have this option, which means if you don't delete mail from your POP account, it will eventually fill up.

For completeness, the sequence of commands to type into telnet to delete a bunch of your mail:

> telnet pop3.paradise.net.nz 110

USER <username>  // Your POP username
PASS <password>  // Your POP password

STAT                        // Lists the number of messages (e.g. +OK 1108 19255723, which means 1108 messages)

// Then for each message
DELE 1
DELE 2
...                         // I used a spreadsheet to quickly generate a list of DELE's from 1 to 1108)

Mission accomplished. An empty POP mailbox without installing (or writing) any extra code :)

Kirk