87563
I got into this work this morning, and fired up Thunderbird. After entering my password, I noticed that it was taking longer than usual to start pulling down emails, but I just figured that the server was slow, and moved onto other tasks. A few minutes later, I looked back at the Thunderbird window and saw that it was pulling down 87563 *new* email messages. On a normal day, I usually have roughly 800. So some how I had two orders of magnitude more email than normal, and to make matters worse, Thunderbird choked when it got to roughly 44000, and just started eating up CPU without downloading anything further. At this point, I'm starting to get a bit nervous, so I killed thunderbird-bin, and restarted it, but the damage was done. Now it hung just starting up, because it had over 44000 messages sitting in its Inbox, and apparently that's way more than Thunderbird was capable of handling. At this point, I gritted my teeth, and went to the utterly craptastic Outlook Web Client. Oh, there are many things that are horrible in Outlook, but the web client adds an additional layer of suck to the mix. For starters, its hardcoded to only permit you to view 100 messages at a time in the Inbox. As such, you can only delete a maximum of 100 messages at any given time. If you've got 87563, you are faced with having to delete and load a batch of 100 over 800 times. After scrolling 100 messages at a time through several screens of email, I finally figured out what went wrong (I did something utterly stupid the previous day, which caused a test script to go psycho, and start generating emails at the rate of 2/second for over 15 hours). Oh the pain that comes from trying to delete so much email. And because this is M-Sexchange, its not only clumsy and inconvenient by S L O W. Each batch of 100 messages took about 20 seconds to delete. After plowing through nearly 45000, I finally had enough, and filed an IT request to have the remainder purged.