Russell's Blog

I have a bad habit. I often open my IMAP mailbox directly on the mail host with mutt. This inevitably causes occasional complicated messes when I butterfinger something. For example, a few days ago I accidentally moved all of the read messages to a separate mailbox. I merged the message back in, but not before my desktop, which was patiently monitoring my IMAP mailbox on the other side of town, decided to synchronize a few thousand messages with the IMAP server. This resulted in lots and lots of duplicate messages.

The trouble was, the duplicate messages had different X-IDs so, their MD5 hashes would be different. After fiddling around with formail for a few minutes, I got impatient and banged out this fun little Python hack :

import email, imaplib, getpass

M = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL( '**********' )

typ, data = M.login( getpass.getuser(), getpass.getpass() )
if typ != 'OK' :
    raise Exception, 'Login failed.'

typ, data = M.select()
if typ != 'OK' :
    raise Exception, 'Selection failed.'

typ, data = M.search( None, 'ALL' )
if typ != 'OK' :
    raise Exception, 'Could not get message IDs.'

id_list = data[0].split()
mids = []
for id in id_list :
    typ, data = M.fetch( id, '(RFC822)' )
    if typ != 'OK' :
        raise Exception, 'Could not fetch message ' + id
    mail = email.message_from_string( data[0][1] )
    mID = mail.get( 'message-id' )
    print mID
    mids.append( (mID, id) )

mids.sort()

dupes = []
for i in range(len(mids)) :
    if m[i] == m[i+1] :
        dupes.append( m[i+1] )

print 'Found ' + len(dupes) + ' duplicate messages.'

for m in dupes :
    typ, data = M.store( m[1], "+FLAGS", '(\\Deleted)')

print 'Marked ' + len(dupes) + ' for deletion.'

typ, data = M.expunge()

print 'Expunged ' + len(data.split()) + ' messages.'

Duplicates begone!

It's a little annoying that imaplib doesn't have a friendly wrapper function for marking messages for deletion, but M.store( m[1], "+FLAGS", '(\\Deleted)') does the job just fine.

I've been puzzling over how to go about manipulating the NEF RAW images my camera produces. Obviously, it is better in principle to shoot in RAW than in JPEG, but the tools for editing RAW files under Linux do not seem to be very far along. For example, The Gimp doesn't natively support them. But that isn't to say there are no tools. Rawstudio provides pretty solid toolbox of basic manipulations. I can finally fix up the colors in some of my favorite shots.

Now, if only I had some good way of doing demosaicing, I'd be all set.