I am subscribed to 237 mailing lists and even though my tools are
adequate, I still consider them suboptimal since I just hit 'delete'
on most threads. I have a server receive all my mail and procmail it
into topic folders. From there, five clients use offlineimap to keep
a synchronised copy of the entire collection for use with mutt, and
I also use webmail occasionally.
Ideally, I would like to be able to tag threads as 'ignored' and
have them disappear and never show up again. I am currently playing
with the thought of setting up some sort of shell script on the
server that can take a criteria specification and turn it into
a procmail filter to ensure that any further messages matching the
criteria are sent to the void gap.
On the client I would then use another shell script to create the
criteria specification after being invoked on a message through
a mutt keybinding, and pipe it via SSH to the server.
However, the whole solution has a hack feel to it, and I think it's
going to be very brittle. I am also not sure how to create the
criteria. Using the subject does not really work reliably because of
all the whack clients, and similarly for the MsgID/References
headers.
I am also afraid that I bog down the server if I keep
programmatically increasing the ruleset of the procmail memory pig.
I guess this could be solved by timing out entries in the ignore
table after e.g. 30 days, but that's just another complexity I would
love to avoid. Unfortunately, formail's msgid cache seems not to be
tweakable to understand the notion of threads.
So before I go and implement something to fit my needs, I would love
to hear how other people address this challenge.
One thought I had was to use an IMAP folder instead of the SSH
communication thingie, so that messages can be moved there, get
synchronised to the server, where a cron job picks them up and
ensures that no related messages make it through procmail. This is
trivial to implement as I already use it to train spamassassin and
crm114 from the clients.
Any input appreciated!
--
martin; (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
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