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).
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.
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.
Cat Loves His New Jeep So Much - The Dodo https://www.thedodo.com/close-to-home/cat-loves-his-new-jeep-so-much
Also, that's probably where I'll be teaching the class from so a guest appearance by the cat is likely, but not guaranteed.
Now that registration is open, here's the trailer for my next workshop. I'm surprised by how low they decided to price that as that's a bargain just for the coffee participants get even if it didn't also have the educational aspect.
https://video.typica.us/videos/watch/2e31ddb3-da40-4943-ac98-7d74c5cca1ef
Author of Typica software for coffee roasters.