Re: Duplicate messages

[Hanak David <dhanak@inf.bme.hu>]

On Tue, 02 Sep 2003, Philip Clark wrote:

> This only seems to work for incoming email ie. it saves the headers in
> .nnmail-cache to do it. I need to do it for exist mail folders. Any ideas?

Right.  That's a tough one.  I can't think of any direct methods, but I
have two workarounds in mind.

1. You could write a summary sort function that orders articles by their
   Message-IDs.  Then you could detect duplicates by skimming the summary
   list looking for equally long articles one after another, checking
   matches more carefully.  Still a lot of work if you have many articles.

2. Remove the .nnmail-cache file, then respool all mails (at least those
   where the duplicates appear), then filter the newly created
   .nnmail-cache with sort | uniq -d.  The ones listed will be hopefully
   duplicates.  Finally you can match the duplicate Message-IDs to article
   numbers, and voila.  Now that I think of it, it is quite complicated
   this way, too.

I hope that helped.

David