Deleting duplicate mdir emails using php

In an attempt to speed up my imap access I moved old emails in to folders based on year. This speed up process majorly backfired when imap/mdir decided to make 7 copies of each email in the same folder. I ended up with 27,000 emails in my 2006 folder!

With my mailbox quota full I needed a quick solution… and couldn’t find one! Thunderbird has a plugin that will search for and delete duplicate messages but it runs over imap which crippled the server trying to handle all the requests.

Using Google I stumbled across this solution for finding and deleting duplicate messages using reformail but after getting reformail installed I found it to be very slow and the number of messages to delete didn’t add up so I had to abandon this approach.

In the end I decided to write my own PHP script that would cycle through the specific mail directory, search for duplicate messages based on the Message-Id (or a checksum of the email if not available) and then delete the unnecessary, duplicate emails. It worked a treat, and went through the 27,000 emails in less than 5 minutes! If anybody wants the code, its below!

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Changing the power supply unit on a powermac g5, after it blows up!

If the PSU on you’re powermac g5 has gone, or you think it may have, you aren’t the only one (see macintouch forums). When I was reading around on the subject I read the failure rate is around 11%, I can’t remember the exact figure but hopefully I’ll find it again later. Luckily Apple did acknowledge the problem and has extended the warranty on the power supply, which you can claim here: Power Mac G5 Repair Extension Program for Power Supply Issues

A relatively new customer phoned us up last week in a panic, claiming his server (the powermac) had stopped working and wouldn’t even switch on. We’d recently set-up a remote backup solution for him and installed an extra internal hard drive in the powermac for local backup. I’m guessing the extra load of the hard drive took it over the edge. Needless to say he needed the server back up asap.

Phoning around we found one supplier with a spare powermac psu in stock. None of the local apple stores did and most companies sounded confused, as if I was asking a silly question. We ended up paying £150-£200 for the psu, a little on the expensive side but desperate times call for desperate measures.

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Age of Empires LAN connection issues

I don’t often get time to play games any more but when I do a quick multiplayer game of Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors is still one of my favourites. Each time I come to play at least one of the computers in the house has been reinstalled and requires AOE to be setup on it again.

The problem I always come across, and one that many others seem to have come across, is that the computers can’t find the game. None of them have firewalls activated and they are all able to communicate with each other for other tasks

The trick is in the connection type when setting up and joining the game. It seems like a really odd choice but select “IPX Connection for Direct Play“. The most obvious choice would be a “TCP/IP Local Area Network” connection but no games are ever found.

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Iriver Clix: Napster Synchronise Issue

Switching on my Clix at the gym the other evening I was greeted by the error “To play this track you must sync your device to your PC“. A gym session feels a lot longer with only music channels to listen to!

I was sure I’d synchronised my device with Napster recently but to be sure I tried again and even transferred some new songs across to see if that helped but still, the same error for every napster song. I tried a firmware update but was on the latest version and so I decided a format was my only option and should sort out everything – wrong!
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