I have used up my Gmail space. What now?
I decide to delete the oldest few thousand mails. But how? The
UI clearly sucks for this purpose (who needs to delete with 2
Gb of space?), but Gmail fortunately allows POP3 access. So I
put together this script as a quick hack (thanks Clint for the tip
about coproc — bash does not seem to be
able to do this…):
#!/bin/zsh -e
send()
{
echo $@ >&p
echo "sending: $@" >&2
}
recv()
{
read line <&p
echo "received: $line" >&2
echo $line
}
coproc openssl s_client -connect pop.googlemail.com:995
while ! recv | grep -q '^\+OK'; do sleep 0.001; done
send user $1
recv > /dev/null
send pass $2
recv > /dev/null
send stat
set -- `recv`
for i in {1..$2}; do
send dele $i
recv > /dev/null
done
send quit
recv > /dev/null
exit 0
and off I go. The POP3 server only ever gives you access to a
few hundreds of your mails, so I figured I’d just call this script
a couple of times, until my inbox would be a little less full. (I
should have used python and a POP3 module for this. 
Yeah, but forget it. Deleting messages from the POP server doesn’t delete the messages from the inbox. Not even If I set it in my preferences. Great.
New Gmail account created, my mission: fill their servers to the brim.
Update: apparently the bug has been fixed. Now messages deleted via POP3 are moved to the trash, where they remain for 30 days, or until I manually delete them. Magnificent, back to the old problem.
Will you please give me 5Gb additional space, Google?
