Spam prevention and privacy on list

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Sat, 30 Aug 2003 dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 11:55:07PM -0400, I.M.Walberg wrote:
> > Also, is anyone interested in having a Subject prefix (e.g. [BLU]) on
> > the list messages to help with their mail?  I'm on quite a few lists
> > and having the prefix helps me scan my email quickly (I like to glance
> > over everything quickly before sorting it into folders).  Obviously, I
> > am new to the list, so forgive me if this has been discussed
> > previously.
>
> I get too much mail to manually sort.
>
> For automatic sorting, there's this great header:
> List-Id: BLU general discussion list <discuss.blu.org>
>
> Modifying the subject is also problematic for those of us who use 80
> character wide terms... if you want to see the sender, the date, the
> size, some flags, and some threading indicators, you're already running
> out of room. "Re: [BLU] Fw: " is fourteen chars there.
>
> Sorry to be a grouch.

On the other hand, this would be an excellent opportunity for Ilane to use
procmail to manually "fix" the subject lines locally. Something like this:

  # Get the original subject of the email,
  # discarding superfluous tabs and spaces.
  # On some systems -xSubject: has to be -x"Subject: "
  SUBJ_=`formail -c -xSubject: \
       | expand \
       | sed -e 's/  */ /g' \
       | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/[ ]*$//g'`

  # Look for any List-Id fields associated with blu.org;
  # Adjust the subject line of said messages accordingly.
  :0:
  ^List-Id:.*blu\.org.*
  | formail -A"Subject: [BLU] $SUBJ_

Untested, but something like this should work.

Note that replies will end up saying e.g. "Re: [BLU] foo...", and replies
to replies will be "Re: [BLU] Re: [BLU] foo..." etc. A better approach to
the problem would avoid adding the '[BLU]' tag if it were already there.

Off the top of my head, I forget how to get a procmail recipe to do a
negative match, but the overall recipe might look like this:

  :0:
  ^List-Id:.*blu\.org.*
  ^Subject:.*[BLU].*
  | formail -A"Subject: [BLU] $SUBJ_

Except that third like here looks for the presence of [BLU], and you
really need to be looking for the *absence* of [BLU]. Fix that line and
the cascading problem mentioned above should go away, I think.


And to go back to dsr's point about manually sorting mail, once you get
this recipe working, you're most of the way along to also being able to
sort messages into different folders automagically.

  :0:
  * List-Id:.*blu\.org.*
  blu

Et cetera :)


-- 
Chris Devers        cdevers at pobox.com
http://devers.homeip.net:8080/resume/

worst-case design, n.
The one delivered.

    -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995