Fun fact: this or a similar thing that spread around the same time was responsible for me writing my first email client. The combination of slow dial up, a server that dropped connections that otherwise would have been up for an excessively long time, and a particularly bad design decision in the Mac version of Eudora at the time meant reading the RFCs and writing something that could delete the malware without downloading it was the fastest way to restore my email.
At the time, Eudora would do POP3 by first asking for the message list, then downloading all the messages, then deleting all the messages. If something broke before it finished deleting stuff from the server, there wasn't anything there to check what had already been downloaded so with thousands of copies of a large attachment clogging things up, that was problematic. Fortunately, LIST reports message size and the malware was all in a small range so I could just selectively DELE those.
Pretty sure this cemented an appreciation for well documented plain text protocols. The relative simplicity of POP3 meant I could learn how it worked and just fix things for myself instead of waiting for my ISP to realize they had a problem.
It was enough messages that it was faster to write a program to do it than to telnet to the mail server and run the commands manually (which I started with as proof of concept).