One of the notification systems at AdMob went insane yesterday and as a result this morning I was looking at just over 19 thousand messages in my inbox. Not that I like dealing with my inbox to begin with. And Thunderbird was choking trying to deal with the volume. Not sure exactly why, but instead of figuring it out I just pulled up the Ruby interpreter and used the IMAP support in the standard library to delete the messages and expunge them. There are probably about a dozen additional ways deal with the issue, but I thought it was a cool bit of hackery and a quick practical usage example.