After the carpal tunnel moment earlier today, I decided to look on the bright side of spam. I updated my hoary old ManilaHandler AppleScript to add support for the Manila.message.delete method (and at the same time bundled the support script SOAPXMLRPCHandler into the body of the script). And I wrote a simple AppleScript, massDeleteManila, that takes a comma delimited list of message IDs and deletes them.
The UI isn’t elegant. You need to type or paste a comma delimited list into a dialog box. Plus no progress bar. But it works, and it is a lot faster than deleting spam through the web UI.
My suggested workflow for using this on your own Manila blog:
- Copy and paste the table for your discussion group topic listing page showing the spam messages into Excel.
- Copy just the message IDs and paste them into BBEdit (or another word processor).
- Search and replace: replace paragraphs with commas.
- Run the massDeleteManila script and paste the comma-delimited list of message IDs into the first dialog box.
- If you haven’t filled out your blog URL yet, type it in, along with your username and password.
- The script runs silently until all the messages have been deleted.
The massDeleteManila script is available for download. I provide it so that other Manila users, such as the Berkman bloggers, can benefit. Please use it carefully—there’s no easy way to undelete messages in Manila, and I cannot provide support if you accidentally delete important content. Note that you may need Tiger to run the script—I haven’t been able to test it under Panther.