A geeky way to delete all emails from inbox…

I swear this is a true story just happened to me.

I’ve got a web hosting company for the site you are looking at right now, and so far, so good. But I didn’t notice until one hour ago that I’ve got a number of test email accounts for my site. And the fact is, now I am having 2400 emails in my inbox wait to be ~~read~~ deleted.

I asked myself the question “how could I do that?”, which led me to think about SSH for remote access to server, the magical unix command line interface, the security for file system if emails are kept as plain text on server, or the MySQL database for email storage… the list went on and on… and after all this I found I didn’t have a clue.

So I raised a ~~PMR~~ ticket to ask for help from support and got a quick response saying: “just try to delete your email accounts and then create them again, this will work.”

NO, IT DIDN’T WORK!

My poor memory can at last got me a hint from previous web development experience that I could delegate to the wonderful Selenium Testing System to try to make a record of the series of actions I’ve done on a webpage, and then play it again and again… Not a clever way but at least it works:

But no… not really, as additional application and code is needed to get the loop part work, which would probably take longer time than just clicking on the inbox’s “delete all marked” button 107 times.

iMacros came to the rescue! I finally got a (dumb) solution by making a marco recording and looping it with iMacros’ built-in control, screenshot :

So… in the end I did get an empty inbox, but I think there must be a better way than this!

Also I am afraid I am soon falling into the XKCD category: