Re: "Do not CC me"
Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> writes:
> Well, the software to do it is around for more than 15 years. Google
> for "procmail duplicate suppression".
This works exactly backwards of how useful duplicate suppression would
actually work.
When someone copies you on a message to a mailing list, you get two
copies, one of which has all the mailing list headers (like List-Id) to
properly filter it into the folder with all the other mailing list
messages, and the other of which doesn't without matching on To and Cc
headers (and missing Bcc'd messages, messages that arrived by way of the
BTS, etc., unless you put a fair amount of effort into chasing edge
cases).
The personal copy is useless; the mailing list copy will get filed into
the proper folder and is the one that you want to keep.
However, the personal copy, for obvious reasons, nearly always arrives
first, so procmail then throws away the copy send via the mailing list
(losing the copy that would go into the proper mailing list archive
folder) and then delivers the personal copy into your inbox, where it
doesn't belong. It's actually *worse* than just living with two copies of
the message.
The duplicate suppression that you want is to get rid of the personal copy
and keep the list copy, but that's more complex to do right, because you
have to essentially quarantine the personal copy while you wait for the
list copy that's supposed to replace it, and then deliver the personal
copy if the list copy never arrives. You certainly have to go to more
effort than just mainining a database of message IDs and throwing away the
message the second time you see it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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