Webmail Madness
QUT has it's own webmail service for enrolled students. It's called Webmail.
The last time I checked my Webmail account was 324 emails ago, apparently in March or April.
One minor reason for this, is that my Webmail account is hard to check.
It's 2751.7% over quota!
I have 2924 emails!
Click the censored snapshot below to see:
Until I'm back under quota, I'm not allowed to use Webmail to save sent emails.
It also means that my received emails are not being automatically organised into the folders I've made for them. I hope this restriction isn't somehow intended to motivate me to delete emails, because this just makes it harder to sort out which ones to delete!
I used to use Webmail as my main personal email address, and I used Yahoo for everything else.
I used to check Webmail at least once every day!
So what went wrong?
Well the last straw was when I began to be showered with messages like the one in the picture (but usually offensive) every day: "Waht Are The Best Love Making Positionss?". And QUT's Webmail is so primitive, that it only lets me filter one message at a time. Does anyone else at QUT have this problem? I've never used my Webmail address for anything on the internet. I use my Yahoo and Gmail addresses to sign up for things, and I hardly ever get spam to those.
Then in 2006... well you already know / don't want to know what happened then... and in 2007 I wasn't at QUT, and at some point before that I discovered Gmail. Yay!
But now I've been back at QUT for a while, and I've already missed some important emails. So now I need to save all my emails and delete them from Webmail.
It's hard to save Webmail emails from a browser. You need to open each email one at a time and save it as a HTML file, and then you need to download each attachment individually. It takes ages!
How long would it take to save 2924 emails? Even when I used this address every day, 100 emails was far too tedious for me, so in 2003 or 2004, I actually wrote a program to do most of this work for me. It scrawled through all the HTML files, and their links, and neatly saved all my emails into folders based on the ones I'd set up in Webmail.
I was quite proud, because I wrote this program in QBasic, and... let's just say you're not supposed to be able to do things like that with QBasic, which is a very ancient semi-interpreted language. Besides the fact that it "can't" access the internet, it also "can't" read or write files with file names longer than the old 8 characters plus 3 characters for the suffix and it can't recognise case.
Nevertheless, I managed to make it access and save each email as a file using the subject (sometimes greater than 30 characters long) as the file name. The QBasic program would actually write another QBasic program and write and run a batch file which would change all the file names, do other things, and execute the other program, which would in turn do the same thing until there were 5 programs. I won't share the rest of my secrets because... it would probably bore you.
This was working quite well until QUT changed the format of Webmail a little bit, and I couldn't be bothered tweaking the program, especially when they've now got an alternative "Advanced" system which I'm afraid they'll phase out the old one for at any time.
Another problem with my program is that it didn't yet save attachments. I still had to painstakingly download those one at a time, and there are about as many of those as emails. It also got a little huffy when I received an email while it was doing it's stuff. Well, no, actually, that was me.
These days I'm probably too old to play such insane games with programming. I would probably just write it in Java. No wait! I would do what I just did today. I went to the IT Helpdesk and asked them if there was a quick fix. There is (there didn't used to be, because I did ask them before. I'm not that proud). It's called Outlook Express.
Even though I'd rather rewrite my program in QBasic than use a Microsoft program I hate even more than most other Microsoft programs, if I keep reminding myself that QBasic itself is a Microsoft product, and that desperate times call for sensible measures, I might be able to do this quickly enough to forget it ever happened... Or I could use it as an excuse to play with Opera Mail...
The last time I checked my Webmail account was 324 emails ago, apparently in March or April.
One minor reason for this, is that my Webmail account is hard to check.
It's 2751.7% over quota!
I have 2924 emails!
Click the censored snapshot below to see:
Until I'm back under quota, I'm not allowed to use Webmail to save sent emails.
It also means that my received emails are not being automatically organised into the folders I've made for them. I hope this restriction isn't somehow intended to motivate me to delete emails, because this just makes it harder to sort out which ones to delete!
I used to use Webmail as my main personal email address, and I used Yahoo for everything else.
I used to check Webmail at least once every day!
So what went wrong?
Well the last straw was when I began to be showered with messages like the one in the picture (but usually offensive) every day: "Waht Are The Best Love Making Positionss?". And QUT's Webmail is so primitive, that it only lets me filter one message at a time. Does anyone else at QUT have this problem? I've never used my Webmail address for anything on the internet. I use my Yahoo and Gmail addresses to sign up for things, and I hardly ever get spam to those.
Then in 2006... well you already know / don't want to know what happened then... and in 2007 I wasn't at QUT, and at some point before that I discovered Gmail. Yay!
But now I've been back at QUT for a while, and I've already missed some important emails. So now I need to save all my emails and delete them from Webmail.
It's hard to save Webmail emails from a browser. You need to open each email one at a time and save it as a HTML file, and then you need to download each attachment individually. It takes ages!
How long would it take to save 2924 emails? Even when I used this address every day, 100 emails was far too tedious for me, so in 2003 or 2004, I actually wrote a program to do most of this work for me. It scrawled through all the HTML files, and their links, and neatly saved all my emails into folders based on the ones I'd set up in Webmail.
I was quite proud, because I wrote this program in QBasic, and... let's just say you're not supposed to be able to do things like that with QBasic, which is a very ancient semi-interpreted language. Besides the fact that it "can't" access the internet, it also "can't" read or write files with file names longer than the old 8 characters plus 3 characters for the suffix and it can't recognise case.
Nevertheless, I managed to make it access and save each email as a file using the subject (sometimes greater than 30 characters long) as the file name. The QBasic program would actually write another QBasic program and write and run a batch file which would change all the file names, do other things, and execute the other program, which would in turn do the same thing until there were 5 programs. I won't share the rest of my secrets because... it would probably bore you.
This was working quite well until QUT changed the format of Webmail a little bit, and I couldn't be bothered tweaking the program, especially when they've now got an alternative "Advanced" system which I'm afraid they'll phase out the old one for at any time.
Another problem with my program is that it didn't yet save attachments. I still had to painstakingly download those one at a time, and there are about as many of those as emails. It also got a little huffy when I received an email while it was doing it's stuff. Well, no, actually, that was me.
These days I'm probably too old to play such insane games with programming. I would probably just write it in Java. No wait! I would do what I just did today. I went to the IT Helpdesk and asked them if there was a quick fix. There is (there didn't used to be, because I did ask them before. I'm not that proud). It's called Outlook Express.
Even though I'd rather rewrite my program in QBasic than use a Microsoft program I hate even more than most other Microsoft programs, if I keep reminding myself that QBasic itself is a Microsoft product, and that desperate times call for sensible measures, I might be able to do this quickly enough to forget it ever happened... Or I could use it as an excuse to play with Opera Mail...
posted by Mathieu | 5:04 pm
|
1 comments
