Huh, back in the 2001/2002 timeframe I worked at an old company that gave everyone a Windows laptop but us engineers also had UNIX accounts on the server cluster, which we logged into for dev work.

Our company was hit with one of the worms (don’t remember which). Thousands of emails constantly coming in and everyone scrambling to delete them - except people like me, who were on vacation. I returned to an inbox that instantly crashed Outlook. IT was trying to find a solution. But I logged into the UNIX cluster, opened Pine, and deleted all the crap, page by page. When I got most of it done, Outlook started working again.

IT was shocked but then told everyone else to go do what I did, eliminating their need to do any work. So I guess you win some and you lose some..

ILOVEYOU was in 2000 and behaved that way. I remember we just shut off our Exchange servers until there was a fix. Email was still new enough that the world didn't implode.

Couldn't you delete or filter /var/spool/mail?